My proposed way of breaking the logjam with city of Boston has two prongs:
1. Have several independent people simultaneously and persistently asking for a letter allowing them to have a subdomain. Provide social proof that at least a few people want the city to provide this service.
2. Obtain a letter from another MA locality which is more willing/able, to be able to show the city that its possible within state rules. I was planning to give it a go with Cambridge.
I am happy to forward my correspondence with the city to you or anyone interested in giving it a go. You can find my email address if you look.
I only have first hand experience with boston.ma.us and seattle.wa.us, and might have some of the terminology wrong but:
* Originally, anyone could ask to take responsibility for a locality, and serve as the registrar for it. Individuals and small ISPs did this en masse.
* Many decades have passed, many went out of business or became derelict in their obligation to administer their delegated subdomain.
* When this occurs, the responsibility rolled back up to top level registrar which today is GoDaddy (used to be Nuestar until they got bought). GoDaddy's policy is that they'll only give out a subdomain registration on a locality if you show them a notarized letter from the locality's government saying you can have it. They will _not_ delegate the whole locality back to a local entity to set up a process.
* No one in local government will furnish this letter, because it's logistically inconvenient ("no notary in our office") and there's no official policy on how to handle the requests ("all I can find is this state law that says we can't"). My representative declined, and even talking with the tech people in City of Boston only went in circles. I may have been the first person to ask, and they'd probably rather I registered an .e.g. .boston and left them alone.
Meanwhile for Seattle, the small ISP that manages the locality TLD is alive and well and will hook you up within the week for free. I registered http://rcr.seattle.wa.us/ while talking to the Boston IT people as a small demonstration that other similar localities have functioning ecosystems around the TLD, to no avail.
That indicates that approval has been rolled up into GoDaddy at this point, and you’ll have to get a notarized letter from the city for them to issue you a domain.
Unfortunately the author is correct that you’re pretty screwed if the locality is no longer delegated. I messaged GoDaddy to register one in Boston, they asked for a _notarized_ letter on the local governments letter head approving. No one within the Boston city government knew what their procedure would be, and those willing to say yes didn’t have a notary around. They ended up citing a state law indicating that no locality domains were to be used for _government_ purposes in MA as their reason to say no, when of course that has no bearing on private use…
If anyone would like to band together to push city of Boston or Cambridge to start approving these, please let me know! I can revive some email chains.