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Vienna is the first city with its own TLD

Kevin Murphy, January 3, 2014, 13:22:01 (UTC), Domain Registries

The world’s first city gTLD, .wien, went live on the internet this morning.
It’s the TLD for what the English-speaking world calls Vienna, the Austrian capital.
While its nic.wien starter page doesn’t seem to be resolving yet, .wien itself is in the DNS root zone file.
punkt.wien, the new registry, said in its application that .wien names will be restricted to anyone who “can demonstrate that they have an economic, cultural, historical, social or any other connection” to Vienna.
The same test will apply to the use of .wien names — the registry plans to review the content of sites under the gTLD from time to time to ensure compliance.
The policy appears to be modeled somewhat on the .cat geo-gTLD.
According to the .wien application, about a quarter of the Austrian population lives in its environs, giving the gTLD a market of about 1.7 million people.
The registry is planning to launch properly in March, according to its web site.
While it’s the first city gTLD to go live, it isn’t the first geo to hit the root in this round — that honor belongs to .ruhr, which represents a German state.
(Note: Laos’ ccTLD, .la, is often marketed as a city TLD for Los Angeles, but it’s not quite the same thing.)



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Comments (8)

  1. Rubens Kuhl says:

    Although .ruhr fits the GeoTLD group (http://geotlds.org/) criteria, ICANN AGB criteria was stricter than that, making .wien the first delegated TLD where government support was a requirement.

  2. Ray Marshall says:

    I couldn’t agree more with your comment regarding .LA. Having just two letters that represent both a city and a metropolitan area is better than having four letters that just represents a city. No new city gTLDs can have less than three letters, yet, .LA is only two letters. Just one more reason why .LA is the hottest city TLD. LA has a GDP of Brazil and is the entertainment capitol of the world. Perhaps we should ask why you are advertising .LA on your website if it’s not the same thing. Don’t see an add for .WIEN. 🙂

    • Rubens Kuhl says:

      Ray, if you are unconfortable with DI editorial policy, I’m pretty sure .wien would welcome the donation of your remaining days of ad spot.
      BTW, your GDP reference is wrong. Brazil GDP is 2.3 trillion USD, while LA metro area is less than a trillion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._metropolitan_areas_by_GDP ; LA metro area is more like the GDP of Netherlands (source: Wolfram Alpha)

    • Kevin Murphy says:

      DI happily accepts advertising from any company in the industry. Nobody has ever been refused.
      But advertising does not influence editorial.
      If DI sucked up to advertisers all the time, nobody would trust what it published, people would stop reading, traffic would go down, nobody would want to advertise, and I’d be out of a job.

  3. John Berryhill says:

    Best thing to happen since the lesser-known JFK speech, “Ich bin ein Wiener.”
    The new TLD critics will no doubt be waltzing to a different tune.

  4. ursinger says:

    ok gentlemen, doing the good old wisenheimer game , “ruhr” is not a german “state”, it is a whole region containing several states and probably has the GDP of LA as well 🙂

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