The center is located only 35 miles from Manhattan to ensure there is as little delay in data transmission as possible. When you run the world’s largest stock exchange, time is of the essence.

Built on the site of an old quarry, the data center will be finished next year. It will hold several football fields worth of hardware and cables. The cost of the project hasn’t been released, but my guess it isn’t cheap.

Sources | NYConvergence and WSJ

Yesterday, Former New York City Mayor Koch made news when he announced his support for dotNYC LLC, whose plan calls for selling the names for £6 ($10 USD) a year.

“.NYC is the best real estate opportunity in New York City since the Dutch bought Manhattan. I can’t wait to sign up for edkoch.nyc, and while I’m at it I’ll probably sign up for mayorkoch.nyc as well,” Mayor Koch said. “I’ve done my homework and the experienced team behind dotNYC LLC is the right team to run .NYC.”

Based in New York, dotNYC claims it has previous experience operating TLDs. Several of its leaders helped found ICANN.

Several other cities, including London, Paris, Berlin, Boston, and Mumbai, seek to carve out their own Internet niche by creating new extensions.

The names are being registered at a rate of 10,000 per day. The extensions available include .nyc, .berlin, .xxx, .blog, .news, .radio, .dallas, .sucks, .futbol, .family, .arab, .health, .golf, .resort, and .quebec.

Only a name and email address is required to reserve a domain. The preorder site is available here. No fees have to be paid until the domain is approved and registered.

The new TLDs are expected to be available in 2010, but keep in mind that ICANN isn’t even accepting gTLD applications from registrars yet.

I for one am skeptical about this. What if the the two registrar’s joint applications for the names are not approved? What if another registrar gets an application in first?

Finally, there is no guarantee that by preordering a name, you are entitled to it. Just by registering an account with my name and email address (which I didn’t have to confirm), I was able to preorder a number of domains. I reserved pizza.nyc, computer.news, and computer.blog, among others. Do I expect to get them? Fat chance.

Pool.com and Quintaris aren’t dumb. They’re using the preorder process as a way to gauge demand and avoid risk. If a gTLD doesn’t receive enough orders, they’ll just can it.

Finally, the reservations are not legally binding and the registration fee hasn’t even been announced. This has been done on purpose. Quintaris-Pool will probably register the preordered names themselves and demand an exorbitant for them.

My guess is the joint companies will end up holding auctions for each name, at least ones with more than one preorder. You see, after reserving computer.blog, I created a second account to see if I was given exclusive access to reserve it. Unsurprisingly, the site let my second account preorder the name as well. This means that multiple users can preorder the same name.

Pool-Quintaris is misleading customers about the preorder process. One would assume only one person could reserve a given name, but apparently there is no exclusive access to any name. There will be a lot of shock when domainers find they have to pay a huge price for the valuable preorder they thought they had exclusive access to. Trust me on this: you’re not going to get a domain worth £10,000 for £10. This poor business practice is just one reason why ICANN’s gTLD program is bound to fail.

The idea has been bandied about the city by various individuals and groups for some time. It was first officially brought up at a Queens city council meeting in 2001, but entrepreneur and NYC resident Paul Garrin says differently. He claims to have invented the idea himself in 1996. He claims he has been using .nyc domains on his own servers for years, though they have never been accessible from the web.

In a February address to the city, Council Speaker Christine Quinn brought up the idea of .nyc as a way to increase revenue.

Mark Twain famously advised “Buy land, they’re not making it anymore.” Well now we can make more New York addresses – just on the internet! A local business won’t have to outbid a guy in Kansas to get Tony’s Pizza dot com. They’ll be able to get Tony’s Pizza dot NYC, a name associated with the greatest city – and home of the greatest pizza – in the world. Most importantly, we expect to generate millions of dollars a year through the sale of web addresses ending in dot NYC.

Regardless of who invented .nyc, would a city-level domain extension be successful? There are two sides to the question.

There’s no getting around the reality that the domain will only have local appeal. But with a population of 8.2 million, the Big Apple holds more people than most countries- including Finland, Ireland, Israel, and Denmark. These places all have all done well enough with their TLDs, so why couldn’t New York?

In 2006, the LA Names Corporation, based out of Guernsey, obtained permission to market the .la domain, the TLD of Laos, as the domain of Los Angeles. For a while, several registrars offered “Los Angeles” domain registrations. The geo TLD never really caught on, though the suffix has also been marketed in a limited scale for use in Lousiana and Latin America.

There is also a movement in Berlin to get a .berlin domain. In 2008, the city joined arms with Barcelona, Hamburg, New York City and Paris to form an ICANN committee devoted to city TLDs. The same year, ICANN announced changes to its TLD creation policy. The new rules will allow any company or organization to create their own extension.

New York is expected to make a proposal to ICANN this year. But will it be too late? A calculation city officials have failed to take into account is that while few businesses had websites in 2001, many more do today in 2009. Would a business that’s owned a .com for years be willing to make the switch.

Unlike with the failed .la, New York City’s government is behind the proposed TLD. This, in my opinion, will be critical to its success. With the backing of the city authorities, businesses will feel like they are making a sound investment and rush in droves to get the best names, even if they already have a .com. Wouldn’t it be great to be the only pizza place in town to own pizza.nyc? What about nails.nyc, photo.nyc, or weather.nyc? The opportunities are endless.