Despite recent Internet rumours to the contrary, no price has yet been set for .BERLIN. But the German city's TLD endeavour is thriving, as we found out from dotBERLIN CEO Dirk Krischenowski.
DotBerlin CEO Dirk Krischenowski
Dirk, can you tell us how .BERLIN is going and what’s been happening for the TLD in the last few months? We had our annual meeting at the end of August. We highlighted the .BERLIN community, which has been growing and now has over 100 partners representing individuals and also tens of thousands of small, medium and large enterprises from nearly every sector in Berlin: Internet, tourism, publishers, facility management… There are many creative industry partners as well as Berlin federal state owned organisations.
The most important development during the last few months is the agreement we reached with the city portal Berlin.de and the Senate of Berlin. We signed a letter of intent which includes a number of details regarding the management of the .BERLIN namespace such as the reservation of domains in the public interest. In connection with this letter the Senate of Berlin published a statement to the parliament of Berlin which includes a neutral position (no objection) towards the .BERLIN project. This is an important step forward to a successful application with ICANN.
You are the creator of the DotCities group. Does the group have any new members and when will it be officially recognized by ICANN? In Sydney the DotCities group (.BCN, .BERLIN, .HAMBURG, .NYC and .PARIS) decided to include additional projects such as .ROMA, .KÖLN, .LONDON and .TOKYO as long as they become a registered organisation (this is the minimum entry requirement for our group). We may see more cityTLD initiatives join our group at the next ICANN meeting in Seoul at the end of October, where we will also discuss our status with ICANN staff and directors. Since ICANN sees us as valuable enrichment of its stakeholder landscape we are confident of becoming an officially recognized body when ICANN has finished organising the participation of interest groups and constituencies.
There are some rumours going around of a 30€ price for .BERLIN, any truth to that? Yes I saw this story published on the Web. It’s strange, since I did not talk to the person who wrote the story. So I would say a lot of it is either a guess or hasn’t been well researched.
We have always said that we want .BERLIN to be as inexpensive as possible, but that we would not compete with .DE. We’ve been discussing these estimates with the registrar community in Germany for quite a while now. With the huge upfront investment we will have cumulated by the time the first .BERLIN domain is sold, a registry price of between 10€ and 20€, which may be lowered when there is high demand for .BERLIN domain names, has been discussed. But a fixed price of 30€ as written is simply not true.
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