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The Las Vegas Sun ran a story yesterday (link here) regarding the efforts of the City of Las Vegas to enter into a partnership with a local company, Dot Vegas Inc. (?Dot Vegas?), over the creation of a new top-level-domain (?TLD?) ? .VEGAS (a new domain name address suffix that could be used instead of the more common TLDs of .COM, .ORG, or .NET). Dot Vegas is proposing that the City of Las Vegas get 75 cents per registration or 10 percent of the gross revenues from future registrations.

But another player in the picture is The Greenspun Corporation which owns VEGAS.COM (along with numerous Section 2(f)-based trademark registrations for the domain name as mark) and which has also been evaluating the business prospects behind a .VEGAS TLD ever since ICAAN announced in 2008 that it would allow the creation of custom TLDs. The CEO of Vegas.com reportedly was prepared to enter into a partnership for $1 per registration.

Further complicating the matter is the ?Vegas? governmental municipality with the authority to be involved in (and receive the benefits of) the .VEGAS TLD. After all, while most local Las Vegas residents recognize and understand the distinction between the incorporated City of Las Vegas and the unincorporated area of Clark County, Nevada, most outsiders may not realize that most of what the public identifies as Las Vegas, including ?The Strip? (the area most often associated by the public with ?Las Vegas?) is technically in the unincorporated area of Clark County and not within the City of Las Vegas. This has certain Clark County officials raising questions about whether the City of Las Vegas should be the only ?governmental municipality? in ?Vegas? benefiting from registrations of .VEGAS domain names.

For now, while the possible partnerships and conflicts over the creation of a .VEGAS TLD make for interesting news articles (and blog posts), such talk is somewhat premature (to paraphrase the MarkMonitor.com representative quoted in the Sun article) given that ICANN has yet to issue final rules regarding applications for such customized top-level domain names. Information and announcements on ICANN?s gTLD program can be found here.

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