City Says You Won't See '.philly' Anytime Soon
By Ian Bush
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - The way we surf the web could see a big change within the next couple years. Last week, the group in charge of Internet addresses announced the names of new proposed web suffixes, such as .music and .love instead of .com. But, there won't be a .philly -- at least not for now.
New York City applied for .nyc. A newspaper wants to sell sites based on .boston. So, where's Philadelphia among the thousands of proposals for these top-level domains?
"We really didn't believe it would provide us any more Internet presence than we have today."
City chief innovation officer Adel Ebeid says, with so few U.S. cities applying in this first go-round, it's not a competitive disadvantage.
And anyway, it's expensive, "$185,000 and a hefty price tag -- a five-digit price tag -- for maintenance each year thereafter was way too much for us at this point. We couldn't really articulate the value and the benefits for that type of investment."
So, there won't be tourism.philly or 311.philly -- at least not for now.
If the cost comes down, Ebeid says they'll consider it, though a simple web search also does the job (and it's free).
"We could certainly use it as an umbrella domain to try to corral all the public-facing services, plus the tourism, plus any other activity that's happening in the city that's Philadelphia-focused."
And, Ebeid says, they're also watching for Internet land-grabbers who might want to snatch up .philly to sell their own sites based on the city's name.
