Enough is enough there are far too many domains already.

Surely city domains for information should be city.INFO e.g. nyc.INFO

.cat for the Catalans maybe ?!?!? (should be under .ES)

.kurd for the Kurds and Kurdistan (parts of 3 countries)

.basq for the Basque region (parts of 2 countries)

Both would be extremely controversial especially in relation to terrorism etc.

Enough is enough there are far too many domains already.

Surely city domains for information should be city.INFO e.g. nyc.INFO

.cat for the Catalans maybe ?!?!? (should be under .ES)

.kurd for the Kurds and Kurdistan (parts of 3 countries)

.basq for the Basque region (parts of 2 countries)

Both would be extremely controversial especially in relation to terrorism etc.

More like .eus for Euskal-Herri, the name of the Basque country in basque.

As for Catalonia, like the Basque country it spans both France and Spain, so there is no justification for making a language-linked domain a subdomain for any single country.

However, I suspect the usual narrow-minded politics will prevent this sort of thing happening, especially for the Kurds, who should never have been partitioned in the first place.

.austin is that Austin, TX or Austin, MN

And which of the 42 Springfields get .springfield? Never mind the prospects of non USA cities.

geoTLDs are an extravagance. Now I can see some value in language and customs. However, will .basq get blocked in Spain? And I can just imagine how popular .kurd will be in Turkey.

"The city TLDs, such as .nyc for New York..."

Surely, New York should be using "*.nyc.us"? Or better yet, "*.nyc.ny.us" since technically New York is in New York.

Bloody Americans. Once again ICANN shows it has no idea what the world looks like outside of the US.

This a genius idea! Now, for example, we can gather all the information about Paris in one place e.g. *.tx.paris for Texas, *.fr.paris (though you don't pronounce the "s" in that one) and *.jailbird.paris for, oh well never mind...

What I don't understand is why it always seems to be assumed that all these new things need to be TLD's! Surely to be useful on a global scale, and useful for everyone to use, there should be some granulatity to the domains.

I mean we already have the subsets of .uk which seem to work well, you can easily see that .co.uk is a company in the UK, .ac.uk is an academic organisation in the UK etc.

As Aubry said, city domain names should sit underneath their respective cctld's, just like any other address, thus avoiding the obvious problems of multiple countries having cities with the same name. If people want domains for regions, cultures or languages then that's fine, but they don't all need their own tld. Just create a few tld's for them to sit under, say .region, .culture and .lang, then you can have as many subdomains within that as you like!

Catalan describes an area and language covering THREE countries. Andorra is the world's only country that has it as its sole official language. Clearly a TLD is well justified.

Now, what about partioning the ccTLDs of Belgium and Switzerland?

Keith Langmead's letter makes sense. It's just silly to make geographical areas smaller than countries top-level domains, when countries already are. There's a reason the domain name system is hierarchical.

As for geographical areas spanning more than one country, or for "cultures", what about putting them under new top-level domains .geo and .cul, to avoid conflicts and huge numbers of new TLDs? (Though ".cul" might not fly so well among French-speakers. ".cult" is also problematic, so maybe ".clt"?)

Finally, on ".cat", I'd bet that an American tractor company is not the first thing that comes to most peoples' minds, at least before the furry pet animal.