Bret, I admit I'm not too well informed about the .berlin proposal, but I haven't read anything about approval by the relevant government(s) (presumably being the German federal and the Berlin Länder government) -- do you have any pointers?

Sorry, Alexander. No pointers. You should ask the Dirk and the other .BERLIN folks about the official status. Not sure whether the support has risen to the level of an official proclamation or is simply oral.

-- Bret

Thanks! Judging from dotberlin.de, they have collected quite a collection of statements in favour of the TLD, but nothing official yet.

And I also should add that ICANN has no current process for an application from .BERLIN or any other TLD, so it's even premature to expect they would have everything as well documented as they will by the time an application is due.

-- Bret

I'm surprised you're surprised, Brett. Free2Innovate is the Internet's Fox News. If someone can't point to any posting that doesn't misrepresent facts in favour of VeriSign or against ICANN, they should get a prize.

Kieren

From the beginning of our project we timely involved responsible members of governmental organisations from both, the Berlin Senate and the German Bundestag.

We didn't had the chance to get a statement of our newly appointed federal chancellor Angela Merkel yet, but we already got the endorsement of the head of the Sub-Committee New Media at German Bundestag, Mrs. Grietje Bettin (http://www.bundestag.de/ausschuesse/archiv15/a21/a21_nm/a21_nm_m.html). She
said:

"We expect that the decentralization of the internet advances and there the wish for further domains extensions like city top level domains. In principle we welcome more diversity. There's no reason why the existing extensions like .de, .org, .com should not be complemented and extended. For us more competition is one of the most relevant issues, not only with regards to the rights-owner of the extension but particularly among the registries, which administer the extensions. Here monopolies have to be avoided from our point of view."

We also closely involved Michael Leibrandt (German GAC representative at ICANN, seconded offical from the Ministry of Economics and Technology), delegates from the Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Justice, media spokesmen of relevant political parties, and of course, the Berlin mayor and members of the Berlin Senate.

Since getting full political endorsement is a time-consuming process we are in the middle of the way of getting their acknowledgement. During the approval process, and that means at the earliest end of 2006/beginning 2007, ICANN will contact them anyway by a formal request as they did during the .cat application with the Spanish, French and Andorra government.

Additional statements for .berlin, for instance of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry and city marketing organisations at mentioned at http://www.dotberlin.de/english/statements.htm

Dirk Krischenowski