The assumption is that an economy that is in trouble will necessarily put more importance on the more local economies. A world economy crisis will “degenerate” into national economies and a national economy crisis will result in more individual reliance on the local economy. Eventually it will break down into geographically based economies that would range in locality from “everything west of the Rocky Mountains” to “only things in my immediate neighborhood” and encompassing everything in between.

Assuming then the above, how does that “degeneration into the more local” affect geo-generics. We will examine the effect in the larger general sense as well as speculations concerning specific instances of a geo-generic. We will pick out a few domains that we think are interesting cases - we don’t own some of them, just picking out good examples - perhaps the sum of the individual examinations will sort of define the general case.

“NewYorkLawyers.com”, “NanaimoLawyers.com”, “AnaheimHomeSales.com”, “VictoriaDelivery.com” for example. Nanaimo is a BC city in Canada of about 70,000 people, Victoria is nearby Nanaimo on Vancouver Island with a population of about 150,000. We all know Anaheim and New York. We’ll add a few cities later, and a few other generics to go with them as they become relevant to the discussion.

Is there any advantage to owning “NanaimoLawyers.com” that wasn’t there previous to this current “financial crisis”? I suppose that if domains do not hold their value in general that the absolute losses will be the “dot info” and “dot me” extensions ie maybe “NanaimoLawyers.com” is still worth something but for sure “NanaimoLawyers.me” won’t be. I do see that country codes might hold their value better than any other TLD except “dot com”. “NanaimoLawyers.ca” might be still worth something and might even be better the closer/smaller the area that “local” becomes. In a fight to the death I think that “dot com” wins for a number of reasons but in event of locally restricted internet connections the country code may well have a certain advantage which bears speculation - maybe.

Putting locally restricted internet access aside for the time being we see that in this case the generic is “lawyers” which assumes a functioning court system with competition for clients that presumably have something to pay with. Speaking of paying it remains to be seen exactly how the pure internet stores and services will adapt to the increased amount of trading/bartering that goes on even assuming the survival of the credit card system. Our guess is not well. We feel that the only internet stores that will survive are the “clicks and mortar” ones.

What this means is that the “brandable/fanciful” type of domain like “Froogle dot com” or whatever will be pretty much worthless. It is going to be of paramount importance that we can apply our own locality to another and if there are impediments to anything but geographically based payments then the local internet will be bounded by geographical features like mountains and oceans. “Froogle dot com” will be unable to survive since they had no local presence prior to this financial upheaval. Take a known case like “Amazon dot com” for example. Without credit card payments exactly how long will they last? If people get to the point where they are bartering more and traveling less what will they do? It isn’t as if they can take half a haunch of venison in trade but the local bookstore may well view that as wonderful.

So, non descriptive names are out and without too much discussion so are the pure generics. They may have a place as directories but we don’t think so based on what we have yet to consider which is that the state of internet wires may not exactly improve and we may have to move to the much more flexible wireless. Local mesh networks will no doubt spring up to assist local neighborhoods in communication that enables them to compete. The notion of “compete” will be revisited often here and it is important to explain it starkly - it is going to be increasingly about competition and co-operation with little in between. The strong will compete and the winners will require the co-operation of the losers, there isn’t any area for argument. Once my neighbor and myself have determined which of us is the better driver the loser will have to find something else to do and the winner will help because the neighborhood must prosper and beyond that the city, etc.

The winner should be the geo-generic domain. It provides the portability - when we go from Nanaimo to New York we still connect to the mesh network and go to “NewYorkFood.com” to see what we might be able to get to eat. In Nanaimo we went to “NanaimoFood.com”. No “dining4us.com” in one city and “mycitydining.com” - we have too much co-operating to do and no room for remembering fanciful domain names that are different depending on where you go. You are in Nanaimo, you want a lawyer - go to “NanaimoLawyers.com”.

If a competitive store in some local area gets the prime geo-generic for their internet presence there will soon be no competition, there may well be 3 businesses in a given area that compete and 2 will not survive, only 1 will. The use of a domain like “NanaimoMotels.com” may mean survival rather than having to be one of the “co-operators”.

Some generics will make more sense than others and some localities will make more sense than others and some combinations will be more appropriate than others but whatever the eventual locality is there is no doubt that the prime geo-generics will have value. Exactly what that value is will be seen and it is beyond the scope of this writing to speculate but the overall conclusion is that in the domainer world the smart money will be shifting to the prime geo-generics.