In March 2011, the Internet Center for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved the .XXX top-level domain. The porn industry�staged protests, claiming that the new domain was merely a shakedown effort to secure more money.
Perhaps as a result, a majority of those surveyed said they had no plans to register an .XXX domain: 35 percent out of principle, and an additional 17 percent because of a lack of value. An additional 22 percent said they planned to buy an .XXX domain to protect a trademark, a practice that other industries,�including universities, have employed.
"I do not see the value and I do not support .XXX," said Michael Klein, the president ofHustler, as quoted in the study. "We have been very vocal in our feelings about .XXX, which we feel all it does is cause an unnecessary financial burden to adult companies having to register all their domains under .XXX at ridiculously high prices whereas there there is no value as consumers can easily find what they want at any .com site."
There was more structure to .ca than that.
On 2012-05-29, at 22:52, Simon Green wrote:
> The only country I'm aware of that dropped 2LD was Canada (where the
> second level was a providence, not a type). Canada finally stopped
> accepting them in 2010. No other 'big' countries have done it to my
> knowledge.
Federally-incorporated entities, entities who could demonstrate a presence in multiple provinces and those registering domains supported by a federal trademark were eligible for label.ca.
Provincially-incorporated entities and those which could demonstrate a presence in multiple cities in a province were eligible for label.pr.ca (pr being a two-letter identifier for a province, e.g. "on" for Ontario, "ab" for Alberta).
Everybody else was eligible for label.city-name.pr.ca.
Names originally registered according to these rules are still supported (at least, they remain in the CA zone, so presumably they are renewable). The current registration rules don't allow them, though.
I think the Canadian experience was that the the requirement to evaluate each registration request to find out whether it plausibly met the geographic rules was cumbersome and labour-intensive. The problem wasn't that the CA domain had structure. Nobody has to do manual verification of whatever.geek.nz to find out whether the purpose of the domain is actually geeky; the problem that Canada solved doesn't seem to be an actual problem for New Zealand.
A big concern, I think, is user confusion. The average non-technical user in New Zealand is well used to seeing companies advertise URLs with domain names ending in "co.nz". If that suddenly changed, there would be a period of adjustment. That adjustment was less necessary in Canada because from the early days there were plenty of names registered at the second level.
Joe
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