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No, that's not how it works at all. .gov is a top-level domain. ".gov.us" doesn't exist.

Default domains have nothing to do with it: whatever country you're in, a hostname ending with ".gov" refers to the US government's root domain.

For example, if you're in the UK and you fancy visiting a US government site, you'd type, say, "www.whitehouse.gov", not "www.whitehouse.gov.us", because that hostname doesn't exist. Conversely, if you wanted to visit a UK government site, you'd type, say, "www.number-10.gov.uk", not "www.number-10.gov", because that hostname doesn't exist either.

Just like .mil it looks like all you are doing is submiting a request, it's not an automatic thing. I have looked through the whole site and unless I missed something I saw no admin data.I am still looking, I do invite someone to show me what I missed though

If you need whois data for a ".gov" domain, go to the General Services Administration.

Just to mention, it's .gov and .mil, top level domains in their own right, not .gov.us and .mil.us-- the second-level domains under .us are state abbreviations (.mn.us, for example).

M

• First, my prediction: they'll eventually chose to open up the SLD to follow the UK conventions of .co.uk, org.uk, ac.uk
• Second; a comparison. For some time, the registrars of the .nhs.uk namespace tried to enforce a similar root structure of institution.area.nhs.uk. Sadly they caused suffering on a scale comparable with 1480, coming up with snappy domains like:
  • leicester-ha.trent.nhs.uk
  • northants-ha.anglox.nhs.uk
  • sw-devon-ha.swest.nhs.uk
  all of which are rather like 1480's examples of
  • IVY.PRS.K12.NJ.US
  • DMHS.JCPS.K12.KY.US
  • OHS.EUNION.K12.CA.US
  Are any of these domains memorable (or even vaguely comprehensible)? No. Thats why 1480 and the UK NHS namespace people both fail.
• Finally, given the abject failure of nic.gov to prevent politicians from running a coach and four horses through RFC 2146 in the matter of GOP.GOV, FREEDOM.GOV and FLATTAX.GOV (see slashdot passem 1, 2) we can have little confidence that the same government will manage to do other than screw up .US

Okay, well, we could try the section on page 2:

"A domain name should be derived from the official name for the organization (e.g., "USDA.Gov" or "AGRICULTURE.GOV".)"

Or, we could try the section on page 2 which says:

"Only ONE registration and delegation shall be made for the purpose of identifying an agency"

and wonder about how Armey has wound up with Freedom.Gov and Flattax.Gov

IMHO, the same problem pertains to GOP.GOV. And, after some more digging, I find that it is nowadays nic.gov that administers your GOV namespace, and one Daisy Bhagowalia who is the Domain Registrar. Sadly, she does not seem to respond to email enquiries about why she has allowed RFC 2146 rules to be broken. Perhaps she needs more emails from others concerned with partisan pollution in that namespace.

The .GOV domain is for registration of US governmental entities on the federal level only.

From http://www.nic.gov/REFERENCE/rfc2146.txt

In fact, there are many root nameservers; one for each country out there (.de, .uk, .ie, .au, etc) and the US government and military do their own thing too.

http://nic.gov
http://nic.mil

I'm assuming that either NSI points requests to them, or local nameservers know to ask them (based on the top-level of the request). So this kind of this is already happening, it's just that alternic.org is not in the 'official list' or whatever. Maybe ICANN has something to do with it.

Terror