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U.S. To Re-Administer .US Domain Space
PacketMaster writes: "The United States Commerce Department is accepting proposals to change how the .US domain is administered and registered. Basically they want to know why the .US domain is unpopular, what can be done with it, and who should administer it. According to this AP story on CNN.com even the U.S. Postal Service didn't want anything to do with .US. The request for comments on the changes is here. The .US domain is governed by RFC 1480. It sounds like they want to rekindle interest in the .US domain. I think this change is interesting because I wanted to register in the .US domain earlier this year. The organization that holds the administration function for my geographic 3rd level domain wanted $40 a year to register my 4th level domain. I got a .net cheaper elsewhere but I wouldn't have minded a .US if it was cheaper or free like many .US's are and also shorter -- www.domain.city.state.us anyone? Many other countries give out domain.ccTLD or domain.com.ccTLD; why can't the U.S.?"
Actually, from a cultural perspective, it makes a lot of sense to have country TLDs. Whenever I see a country TLD, I know immediately the culture and economy to whom the site belongs.
.ca ecommerce site. Likewise, a .ca news site would more relevant to me. With a .com/.org/.net, it's just hard to guess these things.
.us domain I don't know, but since it's less popular, I guess Americans don't attach the same value to .us as other countries do to theirs.
For example, being Canadian, I know I won't need to worry about currency conversions on a
How those in the US identify with
** Sig-a-licious **
And what about the people who arent american, who have .com addresses? As well, as another poster pointed out, the net isnt geographical - a lot of .coms want to do international business.
But no-one is going to remember jjjjuiusgames.com either.
Bitchslapped? Give Rob a bitchslap from bitchslapped.com.
Actually, no. That's what .int was for.
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
Webmasters please bear that in mind next time you have drop down dialogue boxes for "country" which include "United Kingdom"
Rich
So I presume you'll put yourself in the .smart domain? Well, I'll hijack your DNS, and move you over to .dumb, so there.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
www.tapeworm.com?
Rich
Back then, there was a lot more cooperation and a lot less commercialism.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I administered a .cc. domain, and in addition to the stupid long naming convention..."domain.cc.state.us" tacked on to the host identifier...I found that the DNS servers I implemented couldn't be the source for any other DNS tier...we had to get another domain name to do DNS services for some not-for-profit's we let co-locate at the college. What a crock! When you register, they ask for the IP of the DNS servers, so what the heck! I suppose it's a way to bilk another registration fee out of people. As I see it (correct me if I'm wrong), there can't be a technical reason. Oh well, I got over it.
- real hackers don't have sigs -
Not quite. ISO is wrong to assign GB to the UK since they are logically different entities. Probably was decided by the French anyway.
But anyway, originally, Janet was not using TCP/IP or DNS and wasn't bound to use ISO. Computer names were of the form (for example) uk.ac.ukc.falcon. When Janet went over to tcp/ip and DNS, it was just simpler to switch it around the other way than to do renaming. Of course, hindsight probably shows it would have made more sense to go through the effort for the change.
OTOH, there are plenty of people in Norther Ireland who dont even want to be part of the UK. Having to be refered to as "GB" would probably send them into a fit.
Rich
For example:
.net to .ne.us and .com to .co.us,
BERKELEY.CA.US
PORTLAND.WA.US
Last time I heard, Portland was in Oregon...
Or has this got something to do with plate tectonics?
No, it is to avoid confusion with portland.org. Similarly, to avoid confusion with the proposed relocation of
OMAHA.KS.US
DENVER.WY.US
> I guess Americans don't attach the same value to .us as other countries do to theirs.
.com IS our country, sadly.
Ryan
What a load of pretentious, meaningless rubbish. Pull your head out of your arse and you'll see that people live in countries. These countries have different languages and cultures. That's the way it is. The majority of us delight in our differences and do not want to become a boring homogenous world. The easiest way to cater for the different countries / cultures is by geographical partitioning of domains. This system is not perfect, but it works well for people outside of the US.
Canada does the same thing, basically. For Canadian companies, you need to have either federal incorpartion papers or trademarks to register a top level domain. Because a lot of small to medium businesses are only incorporated provincially, you are forced to a *.on.ca, *.qc.ca etc. Which sucks as most people would never guess that when doing a search, so it's not worth registering. Even worse, they will also try and force you down to the city level. So it's back to the race for .com etc.
If you administer .us, why do you use .com? ((User #33911 Info) http://russnelson.com/)
I can't say that I don't give a fuck. I've just run out of fuck to give.
i don't get it. how is the GPL limiting one's freedoms?
... and to maintain that certification, the GC's control protocols may not be publicly disclosed. Which open sourcing the code in any fashion would do, in their opinion.
... the GPL here is limiting my freedom to make the best free as in beer program I can from publicly available source code, which means that the pilot community doesn't have as good a free resource as they would otherwise. Nobody at FAI gives a flying fuck about computers, never mind Open Source, there is no way that going to the trouble of changing this would ever get on the agenda in the foreseeable future.
Practical example:
I have this logbook program which connects Ball GC varios with Macintoshes.
There's a number of pieces of GPL code it would be rather nifty to work into this program. But I can't, because the GC is officially certified as an Acceptable Recording Instrument for the purpose of proving FAI world record claims
Yes, they're stupid. No, I cannot change the FAI's mind even if I was idiotic enough to try. So I can use BSD code, public domain code, whatever, and provide a free as in beer program like I am. It would be a better free as in beer program if I could use GPL code, but I can't because the FAI are morons.
Sooo
And who exactly is benefiting? Nobody I can see.
I registered cosmo.pasadena.ca.us last summer. It was easy. $10 one-time charge, and the it only took a day. It all depends on who is administering the domain.
The thing is... you don't get those to yourselves. The .US domain has a place on the net now more than ever, as the .net .org .com .edu's are being used globally rather than just by the US!
.US domain, but it seems that some non-US sites are also not settling!
You're right about the US not settling for a
For example:
http://telstra.com/ & http://www.telstra.net/ - An Australian Telco
http://apcmag.com/ - An Australian PC Mag.
http://www.freedom2surf.net/ & http://www.f2s.com/ - An English ISP.
"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47
"How much truth can advertising buy?" - iNsuRge - AK47
A good space of the geographic subnets of the .us TLD have already been doled out to small-time ISPs, who are free to charge any price for it, and put up any restrictions. These .us domains aren't governmentally controlled as they are elsewhere, nor do they have any enforced rules for use. So, GreenNet can charge something unreasonable for lynn.ma.us, out of proportion to the actual usefulness of the domain. Of course, they aren't selling any, which either means they aren't paying attention to that market, or that their goal is to bilk city governments who might want the domain.
Of course, no one apparently told them that Lynn (et al) is a pretty poor community. Which is why www.lynnma.net at $35/yr exists (and is privately run) instead of www.lynn.ma.us which is going for an undisclosed price.
--
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
If you want a .us domain in one of the zones I control, you're welcome to it. For free. Like most .us domain administrators I know. Whatever is the reason that .us isn't widely used, you haven't hit on it yet. Keep guessing -- maybe you'll graduate to intelligent moron.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Why do something for free when you can make money off of it?
They can employ the Bic Shaver(R) method of making money, however. Bic makes no money off selling you the plastic handle. They make their money off of the razors themselves.
Nothing says Technology, like a turtle-graphic based repository of knowledge.
--
More interesting possible us domains
toys.r.us
computers.r.us
domains.r.us
whatever.r.us
travel.to.us
follow.us, try.us, view.us, hear.us, smell.us, taste.us, feel.us
silly.us !
avoid.us
stay.away.from.us
just.shoot.us
why.us, not.us, why.not.us
know.us, visit.us, fsck.us, love.us, annoy.us, hate.us, leave.us
miss.us (missus... get it? Like Missus Robinson)
dont.tread.on.us
dont.stand.so.close.to.us
catch.the.b.us
we.have.met.the.enemy.and.they.are.us
Ok. I'm done now.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
As if to underscore the absurdity of the .US naming heirarchy, the Dept. of Commerce asks, in all seriousness, whether there are "issues that need to be specifically addressed in the required study, such as 'locality-squatting'...." (see Question 5).
Only in America(tm).
I keep a minimum of bookmarks, for those sites I really visit a lot. For everything else I guess URLs or use Google/Deja/Yahoo/etc.
And I NEVER guess a .us domain.
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
At least .edu is not polluted. In fact, it has become MORE restrictive. You must be an accredited 4-year degree granting institution to get a .edu address. My employer, a community college, was lucky they got there's in 1993 and was grandfathered, else we'd be dtcc.co.de.us instead of dtcc.edu - - -
A good thing too. My boss wanted me to help him register a friends tech school in PA. He wanted a .edu to make it sound "proper." I told him that could not happen. He was not happy! :)
I am inspired by sleep withdrawl and cafeine. With regard to my suggestion in another comment that we'll find a way to resolve namespace conflicts in the tradition of the virtual world instead of the physical world, I propose the Brand Name Service .
Recognizing that the DNS is not suitable for organizing brand and trademark based name resolution, a different framework is necessary that addresses the needs of a namespace composed of brand, trademark, and other forms of intellectual property. Whether you agree that intellectual property is a valid idea, you surely can't deny that people treat it as such and laws exist backing it up. To solve the current problems with DNS namespace allocation is to address the problems people see with intellectual property disputes that arise from use of the DNS.
What is Brand Name Service ?
Specifically, what is it?
Perhaps it would be best to create a system that is a blend of distributed reputation and centralized registration. This is how people recognize each other and entities, and there are working established rules and procedures for dealing with names in such namespaces. There must be an acceptable system we can create in the virtual world that'll interface properly with the system in existence in the real world.
Why is such a system necessary?
- The DNS was created under circumstances which, by and large, no longer apply to the Internet. The Internet is not a research project anymore. DNS solved the very pratical problem of remembering numeric addresses and to institute some semantic ordering of those addresses. A fairly arbitrary system was devised that would map meaningful strings to those numbers for the convienence of people. The system created to allocate those strings was based on the logical, functional, and political network topology of the Internet at the very beginning of the Internet.
Solving Current DNS ConflictsNeedless to say, the Internet has changed with the most significant portion being the political componenet of the network topology.
The DNS fits the old model much better than the new model. It no longer satisfactorially addresses the political needs of the Internet. We can tweak the technology to address the problems or we can wait for the legal system to tweak us. I prefer to solve the problem without getting a bunch of strange hybrid physiecal/Internet commerce laws passed that will erode the potential of the Internet.
The DNS was never meant to deal with intellectual property conflicts other than saying "registrars will sort it out." Now people are discovering that registrars aren't the appropriate entities to sort this out because the namespace itself is inadequate.
So what can be done? Essentially what has to be done is to take the existing intellectual property databases and create a mapping onto the DNS. For instance, if I am Nissan Motor Company and someone has taken nissan.com, no problems at all. People will not simply try nissan.com to look me up. They will go to the BNS, look up "Nissan Motor Company", the BNS would in turn query "nissan-usa.com" to find the proper IP address.
This also eases the problem of internationalization. Suppose I'm only interested in Nissan Motors in Japan. No problem. My browser would have my locality set to Japanese when I typed "Nissan Motors" (or the Japanese equivalent) and the BNS would find the Japanese version of the "Nissan Motors" and query "nissan.co.jp" in the DNS.
This makes the BNS the authority for brand, trademarks, and other types of intellectual property that businesses rely on for reputation.
I'll have to think some more on how the BNS could handle distributed reputation without requiring a centralized repository, but I believe it is only a matter of articulating my thoughts.
What do you think?
The GPL limits freedoms by preventing content creators in cooperative works from deciding the terms on which their individual contribution may be used. One could also say that it limits your ability to freely distribute GPL'd works.
Of course, it does this in the same way that the courts limit your ability to murder people.
--
Of course I know people live in countries. Yes that is the way it is, but it could be better. You see no room for improvement for humanity?
The majority of us do not delight in our differences, we delight in defiling other people because they're different, and quite often over trivial differences such as language, skin color, or ethnic background.
I am not suggesting that everyone pretend they're all the same, I'm only suggesting we stop judging people because there're merely different.
As a Swedish citizen, most of the time I prefer .se URLs to .com/.net/.org. An address ending in .se signals that this is a company/organisation based in Sweden, with a web site in Swedish, and with an understanding of local issues, etc. Even if I understand English (and have been forced to understand more of American culture and attitude than I'd really want to), I certainly prefer a Swedish company to an American.
.com's are American companies, then of course it seems hard to motivate the use of .us. But .com's are not all American anymore. There are lot of Swedish companies in the .com namespace, and from other non-US countries too, I assume.
.us is another matter. The discussion of bringing that system up to today's need has appearantly not really begun yet, but in other countries old and inappropriate rules of their respective ccTLD have been debated (and in most cases, fixed) since long time ago.
The web *IS* about geography, only you Americans haven't realized yet! If you think that all
When you start finding a lot of those sites, such as http://evreka.com, I think the need for a US specific name space dawns upon you.
That you have an archaic system for partitioning the
Chris Penn
R2 Services.com
Techies hiring techies. Recruiting done right.
Techies hiring techies. Recruiting done right!
0.53
Hence we get .edu .com .net .org and the like to ourselves. For good or for ill, Americans will not "settle" for the .us domain.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
The GPL limits freedoms by preventing content creators in cooperative works from deciding the terms on which their individual contribution may be used.
So it forces you to play by the rules if you want to be on the team. And the problem with that is... what?
One could also say that it limits your ability to freely distribute GPL'd works.
How?
----------
I personally chose dugnet.com because I made it short and to the point, but because of where my server is I would of had to go through the trouble of dugnet.wherever.florida.com which is completely worthless to me.
If I could have gone with dugnet.us I definantelly would have considered it much more. All the other countries ... well quite a few of them ... are allowing this ... .cx and .uk are the most famous ones that I can think of.
personally I'd like to see the TLD of .gov open up :-)
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Because, if something can make money then it's a crime if it doesn't. Basic premise of our(US) society.
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
And since most people will have a very hard time finding out whether a given site is topologically close to them, but no problem with geographically close asking them to pick a geographically close one helps.
This might be true in general, but here in the US, our knowledge of geography pretty much sucks...
A lot of people have never even heard of such a tld. Even among those of us who have, the procedure for acquiring such a domain name is not widely known. Perhaps clearing some of the red tape would help?
It just makes no sense to impose geographic only ordering to the web. The web isn't about geography, it's about ideas, and increasingly, marketing and mindshare.
Yes, the length of them is detrimental to their use, but I don't think that's the primary reason.
The big reason is that they're geography based. There are very few uses to which geography is relevent to a web site. I'm not going to use it for my company; what if I move it? I'm not going to use it for a personal address; again, what if I move?
The only reasonable use I can think of to a geography-based address is, surprise!, the government for a particular city, where the geography makes sense to include in the URL. Other than that, including the geography just makes no sense.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
ICANN should rename .com to .co.us, and then open up registration for the .com TLD again. The .com TLD is de facto a US hierarchy, so the DNS might as well reflect that fact, right?
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
in France, hypothetically speaking, for displaying somthing inappropriate under their laws.
"..don't you eat that yellow snow."
You know, 'them'.
I had assumed for a long time that, due to simple American superiority complexes (and I'm an American), although every other country was relegated to com.CC (or co.CC) and org.CC and edu.CC (or ac.CC), that US simply had domain over .com, .org, .edu, etc as their very own proxy ccTLD.
.com to overseas companies, which started to confuse me, because then you couldn't rely on the TLD to determine where a company or website was located. You always knew that demon.co.uk was in the UK, but you couldn't quite be sure where a .com was located anymore.
.us TLD. Then they wouldn't have to live in fear of very, very messy domain name disputes with people in faraway countries where legal action is difficult to initiate and maintain.
.us TLD is to eliminate the gTLDs, long the kingdom of American companies, forcing them all to move use domain.com.us instead. If they already have domain.com, they're not going to see any reason to bother with domain.com.us.
Then they started selling
Which made me wonder... aside from simple American arrogance, why was US so special? Why did other countries put up with having to use ccTLDs while American companies had full reign of gTLDs?
You'd think, with all the hoo-rah about this imaginary "drought" of domain names, that companies would be stir crazy about the
But the thing is, NOT having to tack on a ccTLD at the end of your domain name is confusing, and oh so common. Its much nicer to have sony.com than sony.com.us. (Though they have no problem with also picking up sony.co.jp.) Besides, Americans (especially now) don't want to have to start typing longer URLs, as rare as they actually have to do that anymore.
The only way to get American companies and others to start using the
I don't know why the gTLDs exist anymore if they are not US-only, to be honest, aside from the difficulty there would be in eliminating them now.
--
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
Once you get going it's hard to stop.
this.is.us
have.fun.with.us (*cough*)
fly.with.us, shop.with.us, play.with.us, pray.with.us, verb.with.us
for.us.or.against.us
work.for.us, pay.for.us, pray.for.us
bill.gates.loves.us, cops.love.us, everybody.likes.us
we.dont.like.the.drugs.but.the.drugs.like.us
Really, though, there are some huge opportunities here. If the us government just opened up the following [x].us domains:
for.us, with.us, like.us, love.us, r.us, are.us
and auctioned off each of the attractive subdomains (work.for.us, etc.) they could make a ton of money for wiring schools to the internet, or paying teachers, or something worthwhile.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
So, it seems to me that if the government wants to change how the US is defined, they need to submit a draft in the appropriate format to the appropriate IETF working group for consideration at the next meeting. The US government can't just bypass the procedures that have been set up for managing the internet. (Don't get me started about ICANN.)
.us doesn't need some changes, just that there's an established procedure for change and the commerce department can't just run rough-shod over that procedure.
Not saying that
The .us domain uses the USPS Zip Code guide to decide what is a locality. I can't register murphy.stewart-manor.ny.us or stthomas.bellrose-village.ny.us (for my church) because the USPS *thinks* I live in Garden City and my church is in Floral Park. They are wrong.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Let's see... If I go to Network Solutions, there is no .us domain. Same thing at register.com.
Somehow, I think it would be VERY popular if they had it listed on one of those sites. I don't even know where to go to get a .us domain registered !!!
-Mark
I get my domain name for free! It was a pain finding the admin, but once there I just requested a name and they said sure... It's too bad that there is such inconsistency.
all the US has to do is expressly state that the judicial branch of government will not get involved in disputes over domain names in anything but the .us TLD. Plain and simple. Just say that if you want us to protect your trademark name, then you had better register it in our TLD. Otherwise, it is a free for all.
.us 2nd level. The public education of how the DNS naming works would be worth the effort in itself.
.us 2nd level unless you were somehow involved in all 50 states. I would only be allowed "me".durham.nc.us, but Ms. Portman has a claim to hotgrits.us.
The biggest problem here will be figuring out how to get out of the way as all the big corps rush to register and advertise their
Of course, I would apply the rules proposed by a previous poster. You can't register a
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Not another group of domains.. please.. Opening up another top level isn't going to suddenly make a load more people register new domains, its just going to get a bunch of people squabbling over who 'owns' the .us one. There be a million and one people registering toysr.us, and most companies with an international presence will rush to add another domain name to their portfolios (ibm.co.us, ibm.org.us, ibm.com.us etc etc). In the end the only winners are the registration companies.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
I would like to think that by virtue of the documents I make available that the moderators would place me in
My Kung-Fu is stronger!
Of course, this is just an extension of his meta-troll of mankind.
HTH
HAND
but you would still lose sleep at night woryying half your patrons are going to eds-diner.com by mistake.
---
Oh, that's easy. First, eliminate all TLDs except for country codes. (Grandfather in existing domains, but deprecate the whole ".com/.org/.net" system.) Now it's up to each nation to partition its space as it sees fit, and to arbitrate disputes under its own laws.
Remember that the country codes partition the net by political boundaries, which may or may not correspond to geographic boundaries. So a multinational corporation like McDonalds could register "mcdonalds.XX" for every value of "XX" in which it does business. Or, "mcdonalds.com.XX" or some such if the country wants to sub-partition its space.
Oh, but wait! The shepherd Angus McDonald has already registered "mcdonalds.uk" for his farm and doesn't want to give it up. What's a poor multinational company to do? Appeal to the UK courts, of course. Let the matter be decided according to UK law.
As much as we'd all like it to be, the net is not immune to political boundaries . Disputes are going to arise over names. Lumping everything into a single ".com" space is fine for huge multinationals, but sucks rocks when two completely unrelated local companies in different nations argue about who gets "foobar.com". Who settles such a matter?
As far as the .us domain goes, it needs to get away from the "*.city.state.us" hierarchy. It'd probably be a good idea to subdivide the .us TLD into ".com.us", ".org.us", ".edu.us", etc. And yes, still allow "*.city.state.us" for anyone who wants to show that they're a local concern.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Or shorten it even more and use a system similar to the UK:
.co.us - businesses
.ac.us - educatonal
.org.us - well duh
etc.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
We already are footing the bill, and it is quite expensive.
You know, you'd think someone advertising Libertarian literature in his tag would pounce all over that comment, you tax-abolishing-liberty-loving-son-of-a-gun.
Many schools like the option of using .us to make sure that their website is unique from any other schools that have the same name.
Rename everyone with a .com to .com.us or xyz.int. Don't re-open the .com space though.
To grandfather things in every country should set up their name servers so that in the us if I go to xyz.com it looks up xyz.com.us, while in London it would go to xyz.co.uk. This would require some name server magic that we don't currently have, but it would not be too hard to add.
I'm not sure how the .int that I proposed above would work, exactly, but it looks like we need something like it.
The reason the UK's tld is uk is because the formal title of the state is "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" - gb is only part of the uk.
http://scottish.politicaldiscussion.org
Or rather, the need for good i18n and HTTP content negotiation support. My client tells servers which languages I speak (and how well), and any server can send the most appropriate version of a resource or let my client choose. Any organization can support as many languages as time and effort permit, regardless of where they happen to be, and any convention that requires end users to parse URIs is fundamentally broken.
True, true... now I'm curious - was that just a mistake or intentional, to see if anyone was paying attention? ;)
-- KingKurly --
It was recently discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
Well man its like this... sometimes it takes resources to run shit. Like bigass beer-cooled Sun servers, redundant T3's, administrative/technical/customer service personnel (who incidentally need to eat and drink beer too), climate controlled buildings, generators, big UPS's, fire supression systems, Cisco routers w/support contracts, and toilet paper for the bathroom. Triple all that if you want a fault-tolerant operation with redundant, geographically isolated data centers.
I don't think that's at all an exaggeration of what's involved in running a decent-sized TLD.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Someone, somewhere has to foot the bill for shit. Why shouldn't it be the people who are benefitting from it? Seems pretty fair to me.
--
Standard registration fee for two years on a .com.au domain: AUS$137.50. Standard registration fee for two years on a .com, .net, or .org domain from the same registrar: AUS$121.00. Want to know why the .com.au costs 15% more? I can summarise it for you in one word: monopoly. It used to be free until some capitalists realised what they were missing out on.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
-dB
"It if was easy to do, we'd find someone cheaper than you to do it."
If I type linux in Navigator or IE, I will be sent to www.linux.com, which, in addition to the fact that Internet companies are called .com companies, makes it very easy for most people to find a site if it is registred as .com. I've always considered that the main advantage. Personally I'm using Opera, though, where I can make it also check .no, .net and .org.
cool idea please.save.us (Lifeboat manufacturer) come.with.us (FBI) gotothebackoftheb.us (Ku Klux Klan) help.us (United Way Charities)
a .nj.us domain, what I DO mind is when you add even more letters than that..state.us is a good system. If you want to be state-neutral, then register a .com, etc.
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
Leaving aside the concept of a "private company", I think you'll find it difficult absolutely to distinguish between the two.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
Sure you could. Just tell people that if they want the global "COM" TLD, they need to type ".com." instead of just ".com". DNS was made to do this, remember...
TO BUY A NEW CAR WOULD MAKE YOU SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE.
The real problem with all of these DNS issues (not only .com vs .us, but also the trademark problems, overcrowded namespaces, etc.) is that DNS was never designed to be a locator service. It was designed to attach names to hosts that are easier to memorize than dotted-decimal IP addresses. There have been several attempts at real locator services -- some directory-based, some much simpler (such as RealNames and AOL Keywords) but to date, all of these services have been proprietary, and the last thing the Internet as a whole wants to do is create Yet More Lock-In to a single entity.
.us name for my system for years (a BBS located at uncnsrd.mt-kisco.ny.us) but eventually jumped into a .org instead (address is in my sig) simply because it's easier for people to remember, and to say -- the more abbreviations and punctuation marks that are in a hostname, the more difficult the name becomes to speak when you're telling someone in-person what your e-mail or web address is.
The IETF needs to get its butt moving, to deliver a true Locator Service specification to the Internet. I believe there is a working group on the case, but to date not much has come out of it.
For what it's worth, I used a
--
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Anyone who lied on the InterNIC forms back in the early days got what they wanted. There was a time when you had to be a 503(c) non-profit ORGanization to get a ".ORG" domain. That's not the case now. I suspect that anyone who can lie good enough to say they have accredidation can get a .EDU domain.
At least NetSol filters out the really stupid requests (SEX.EDU).
None of the subdomains suggested by that poster (".com.us", ".net.us") will actually help the system for ".US", just take it further down its path of commercial greed.
I know several TLDs such as .uk shorten .com.uk to .co.uk. Is there some reason for this?
.com thingy.
Yes.
Janet.
The Joint Academic Network was the Uk's equivelent of ARPAnet.
It used UK-AC-MAN rather than man.ac.uk. But the endiennes got changed, whilst the second level domains remains the same. notice that JANET implicetly had a national TLD as mandatory.
Would have saved the whole
i'm canadian, so let me say without prejudice that .ca sites mostly pander to the massive inferiority and insecurity complex that continues to plague the canadian psyche.
Interesting theory. I prefer .ca domains (altavista.ca being one in particular) to their .com counterparts. There's no plague on my Canadian psyche; I'm just pissed that I can't get a .ca domain without owning or running a national company. .on.ca and .region.on.ca are just too specific, so I went and got an .org instead.
The fact that half the time the Canadian registrar wants faxes and/or snailmail to complete the transaction is a little hokey if you ask me.
its as if we're afraid to admit that we're basically an american state for fear that it might not look posh to the eurotrash.
Again, interesting theory. If we were basically an American state, why is the border we share with the Americans such a pitiful attempt at control? (by who? both sides.) Why can I travel from country to country in Europe without seeing so much as a border guard, but here I have to go through a huge hassle every time I want to go visit friends in the United States?
As far as I'm concerned, Canada is quite different from the United States. The laws are pretty much the same (as they are practically everywhere) but the people are different. Not bad different, just different.
Should all names be obvious? Trying to do this is desirable and also impossible. There will come a point when the obviously right name for an organization is already taken. As the system grows this will happen with increasing frequency. While ease of use to the end user is desirable, a higher priority must be placed on having a system that operates. This means that the manageability of the system must have high considerations
If only for finding the location of a virtual space, I don't think we fully understand the impact that this could have if we begin mapping the physical to the virtual. Think about it - if the US Postal Service ran these, every single physical mail address could be easily converted to a virtual address. Will this happen though? Only if we lose the preoccupation with our immediate greed and convenience to consider something larger than ourselves.
So it forces you to play by the rules if you want to be on the team. And the problem with that is... what?
There is no problem. Read: Of course, it does this in the same way that the courts limit your ability to murder people. This meaning that the GPL restricts your freedoms, but those aren't necessarily freedoms you need or should have.
Selling GPL'd works or distributing them without source are methods of distributing them, which you are not free to do.
--
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
So in your plan, all nationally known businesses must relocate to Colorado?
It really is a shame that .us isn't used more. The registrars really need to relax the rulings, and allow local groups to buy domains at the State level (so the names don't get so stupidly long). The key, IMO, would be rules to prevent out-of-state squatting. If you're not from around here, we take the name back.
Yeah, and we need a .THEM domain where all them dirty foreigners can go.
Regards, Ralph.
You can also do things like restaurants.berkley.ca.us and gov.nb.us and gov.losangeles.ca.us.
Usually beats stateofnebraska.gov and cityoflosangeles.gov.
Just how many cities in the US have duplicate names?
How about theothercityofkansas.gov?
the namespace is horribly broken. froever. deal with it.
I'd say that it's pretty obvious that an .xxx domain would be a porn site... ;^)
I have a friend who flew into a fit of rage when he found out he couldn't register ph34r.us...
--
"HORSE."
"HORSE."
-Flaming Carrot
i don't get it. how is the GPL limiting one's freedoms? the only thing i can think of is "well, you *have* to release your source then" - so use a different license. am i missing something here? it makes no sense to me. at all.
--
you must amputate to email me
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you must amputate to email me
i read all replies to my comments
1. The "unwashed masses" do not know that .US exists because it has not been advertised. For some strange reason, beurocrats think they can issue a memo and then the whole world complies. Sorry Bubba, it don't work that way outside of DC (hell, it don't work that way IN DC either, but try convincing a fed of that).
.US domain is the same budget choice for joe sixpack as it is to joe IRS for picking up .gov, or for joe M1A1 to pickup a .mil address. They have no concept of what real "out of pocket" money is.
.US can NOT become *popular* if it is not widely known. (not meant to be a riddle, sorry)
.US widespread and famous. Give them away to a broad base of employees (like soldiers) so that they can market it by word of mouth.
2. Feds do not realize that to make something "unknown" popular amoungst buyers, you use a LOW price, not a HIGH price. They seem to think that massive taxes generate more revenue too. Go figure.
3. For some reason, the feds think that picking ip a
4. Redundant, but needs to be repeated,
Conclusion: the government needs to do the same thing that they did with cigarettes in WW I to make
Visit DC2600
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
>Yeah...and if my business was world wide, which domain would I have?
Firstly, there were no world wide business Ilast heard of. There's no MacDonalds in Uzbvekistan last time I checked. You probably mean international.
Secondly, you've registered your business name in every country you're doing business in, right [if you haven't its likely to be illegal]? And those trademarks? Hmnn, you've registered those too, for each country. Hmmmnnn....I have an idea. WHY DON'T YOU REGISTER YOUR NAME FOR EACH COUNTRY TOO!
I can't believe that's not entirely obvious to anyone with half a clue.
I have the entire answer to this. It is actually quite simple, and I base it on existing laws.
You have a business "Joe's Cars" in Louisville, KY , with no other points of operation. Your domain would be:
http://joescars.louisville.ky.us
OK, say "Joe's Cars" had several locations in KY, then the domain would be:
http://joescars.co.ky.us
Say that "Joe's Cars" was a well-known nationwide business like Coca-Cola, then your domain would be :
http://joescars.co.us
Of course, for this to work it would involve some oversight before assigning doamins, much like the IRS uses existing tax laws to assign taxes. In other word, do you have an office in that state/county/region, etc... Do you plan on expanding to hat area in the next 5 years, etc...
This would do away with the entire "dot com" name pollution and domain hoarding prblem, and probably make it easier for the avergae joe to find what they are looking for, once they learn or are "force-fed" the hieracrhy rules. It would take some time, surely, but this is always how I have seen/desired the whle namespace working... It just makes more sense to me. It avoids a whole lot of conflict...
Have questions? Think I'm wrong? Wanna flame me? All questions emailed to me will be answered. Try me.
xenex@se-tel.com
cool troll dude
Makes sense for other companies too. Instead of having bayarea.citysearch.com (which is hard to guess), you could have citysearch.com.sf.ca.us
Unfortunately, last I heard, it was not possible to acquire a domain in .sf.ca.us. It's a shame that there is no www.sf.ca.us. Also shameful is the state of www.us. sad.
After seeing this article, I got rather curious about registering a .us domain (I had thought about it 3 years ago, and really should have done it then-seemed easier.)
.us successfully? (Especially in Minnesota?)
Well, according to the handy-dandy guide at http://www.nic.us, the US domain registry can't take care of it for me, because the town subdomain is delegated. Unfortunately, the company it's delegated to is no longer doing business under the same name, and the contact address is for the postmaster. I'm too tired to mail them now, but in my past dealings with company in question all I've received is a letter on the proper place to forward spam.
Is it no wonder the locality in question gave up on ci.town-name.mn.us and went over to town-name.org?
So my question is-anyone manage to register a
Well, I had a friend who actually WANTED to register a .us domain, but they wouldn't let him.. I can't remember the reason they gave. I think you _HAD_ to be a business of some sort or an oraganization...
His proposed domain: www.ph34r.us.
Not making that up.. swine wouldn't let him have it.
---
"Music is music, but anarchy is stupid." -- Eli Armen-Van Horn
I would want to be able to register an.us if I could. :D
--
Dave Brooks (db@amorphous.org)
http://www.amorphous.org
www.bird.peen.us
www.fish.peen.us
www.troll.with.us
and the 31337
morewarez.for.us
try.and.hack.us
and the pr0n sites....
cum.with.us
suck.us
f*ck.us
etc.....
it could get equally scary as it is creative.
Besides - I don't think they'd give anything away when there's money to be made!!!
[Connection closed by foreign host]
I appologize for not being clear (i was in a hurry :). What I should have said was that we must make sure to distinguish between the commercial and non-commercial entities. Where commercial would be any -- wait a sec .. I suppose .com.us should be enforced such that only registered businesses may register such domain names.
And of course, registered not-for-profit organizations would go under .com.us and individuals could register under, as I've said .pc.us . Sure, you could sell your couch, but not represent a business from your .pc.us domain. If you are interested in running a business, get a license and register a .com.us domain, but make sure .pc.us is kept for your own personal use. If you're always auctioning things on ebay or yahoo auctions, but you don't have any formal business, use .pc.us to help advertise your auctions, so long as your transactions are not representing a full-fledged business.. if your site is to be used strictly for auctioning, consider obtaining a business license and register a .com.us domain!
There is no doubt that there are flaws with my ideas, but I have answered many of the questions that would have greater potential to be asked.
To answer your questions specifically:
What if only *individuals* could register .pc.us domains?; but the naming scheme would have to be consistent!
I think we could develop a very productive naming system, please email me (i'm more productive when i can discuss things at a more one-to-one level than this generic forum) at:
To make sense of my email address, please convert the capital letters to the actual symbol they represent, where AT would be @ .. etc .. simple! :)
Oh.
You mean that Vancouver -- the one nobody's heard of?
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
This could be an opportunity to fix some of the things that are broken about the current DNS. If we don't want .US abused as badly as .COM has been, it's critical to do something more sane this time. If done right, a revamped .US could serve as a model for revamping top-level domains...
.com.us, okay? (For the myopic people suggesting .co.us, remember Colorado already has that.) If we had a free-for-all in .com.us, it would be abused as badly as .com is. The concept of having a single "commercial" category is absurd. It would be better to have a ".misc.us" as a last-resort option for anything that can't be categorized.
.com, .net and .org are often treated as synonymous (how many companies automatically register all of them?), replicating that mess under .us wouldn't help anything. Instead, it makes more sense to consider what purposes people use domains for. Create a domain structure with more purpose, and enforce reasonable usage. Have non-profit organizations manage the registry. Create "domain czars" a la Usenet 2's hierarchy czars with responsibility for DNS subtrees.
.xxx.us domain dedicated to the purpose. (Just think how easy those domain names would be to filter out!) Don't allow the sex sites to register under inappropriate domains.
.tm.us for trademarked names. (Maybe .sm.us for service marks also?) Create sub-domains under .tm.us for the trademark categories. Require proof of trademark ownership to register under .tm.us, and don't try to police trademarks in the rest of the DNS hierarchy. Allow top-level registrations under .tm.us only for those "well-known" trademarks that cross boundaries. (e.g. coke.tm.us)
.com/.net/.org, and create a proper hierarchy. Use .misc.us as a fallback if necessary. Don't allow free-for-all .com.us registrations like .com registrations. For example, The Matrix should be "thematrix.movie.us" instead of "www.whatisthematrix.com".
.us as well, and .us would be a good proving ground for any proposal for gTLD's...
.com abuse in check. Massive cyber-squatting would be too expensive, and dumping all products into the DNS space (think Kraft) would be prohibitively expensive for even an enormous company, so they'd have to do something more reasonable.
Let's not have
Because
First, recognize that sex sells, and that sex sites aren't going away. Accordingly, create a
Second, deal with trademarks explicitly -- create a
Next, come up with categories that would better represent the things people want to do with
Allow obvious non-commercial domains like ".non-profit.us" (maybe ".org.us", but ".org" has been abused) and ".personal.us" for personal sites. (Could these be categorized?)
Basically, any organizational structure that might be proposed at the top level should be viable under
Another thought I had was to charge VERY nominal fees for the first domain or three, but rapidly increasing fees (e.g. doubling each time) to hold many domains at once -- that would keep some of the
The base fee should probably be determined by the depth of the registration -- free for 5 levels deep, cheap for 4, medium for 3, expensive for 2, exorbitant for 1. If something like ".ibm.us" were allowed, it should cost them millions of dollars annually to hold it...
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
exactly! if somebody registers a trademarked name and the trademark owner sues, the trademark owner shouldn't be suing for rights to that domain, but making a formal request that the domain "owner's" registration for that domain be withdrawn! we shouldn't outlaw squatting, because then, only the outlaws will squat, i suppose. we would benefit more by making it more difficult and less attractive to squat on domains!
It is for this reason that businesses should be encouraged to register trademarks representing their business name.
Invented by a Brit in Switzerland
I like a good organized hierarchy, but the most difficult problem that I've yet to witness anybody solve is how best to do cross referencing such as telling the person "this site leads to that site and you're going there now."
This is the niche the Yahoo! Directory filled. Yahoo! could not change the way the domain system worked, but it was able to change the way people look for things under the current system. With how the current DNS system works, I believe there are many problems with a hierarchial system based on business activities conducted or where those businesses are located, since most large businesses occupy many locations and offer many products of many different names. To classify everything would be a big mess, though Yahoo! has done a good job of making sense of this mess.
I clarified that statement in the post to http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/08/29/03562 46&threshold=0&comme ntsort=3&mode=thread&pid=241#324. This will be of interest to yourself.
What? No. You've got to remember that the US is made up of "dirty" foreigners, except for a very small percentage that we effectively squashed.
I might concede the need for a .them TLD on the grounds that if there's a ".us" then by simple deduction there's a ".them".
I would like to cast out the whole idea of dividing the net up into .us and .them. It wouldn't improve the signal to noise ratio in either domain. I base that idea on the observation that people are stupid no matter where you go.
By the way, under my scheme, it's my guess that the .smart moderators would put your domain in .stupid.
Yeah, and then I could register xlc.us :-)
--
Jonathan Hunt
. . . even the US Postal Service didn't want anything to do with .US. . . .
And there is a very good reason for this. Back in 1981 (the year that they took the copper out of our pennies) The US Post Office and all it's operations were turned over to the Rockefeller Foundation. And they are not a part of the U. S. government. That is why they do not go by the name "United States Post Office" anymore. Because they are *NOT* the U.S Post Office. "It" is now a private organization that provides a *service* to the "United States".
Like most of us - you were probably asleep while it happened.
Bogy
If you can't teach by example, then you'll have to teach by precept . . . Just don't expect it to work as well.
Register spyslike.us
How we know is more important than what we know.
Agreed, web addresses with the state & city in them don't make a lot of sense for most things, but form some they're ideal, for example.... www.retailers-name-here.city.state.us www.cityhall.city.state.us www.tourism.city.state.us
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
There are provincial prefixes for many of the Canadian TLD like this one, but there are also lots of ones like this one. Heck, even this one doesn't bother with the provincial prefix.
I was registering a domain a few years back, and the price was the same for a
sig fault
-B
The US Domain hierarchy is based on political geography. The basic name space under US is the state name space, then the "locality" name space, (like a city, or county) then organization or computer name and so on.
For example:
Last time I heard, Portland was in Oregon...
Or has this got something to do with plate tectonics?
t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
save.us from our own government
We can use a Slashdot style moderation scheme to decide who goes in .stupid and in .smart.
Of course by doing so, Slashdot runs the risk of being put in .stupid. <ducks>
Can I have that one? Please?
support.us - buy bra's on the web
pay.us - DVDCCA homepage
sue.us - Napster's new homepage
submit.us - M$' new site
boycott.us - RIAA
and last but not least:
fuck.us - a petshop
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
Using the .US domain requires your domain be whatever.city.st.us (e.g. geoapps.tucson.az.us), which is wa-a-a-y too long even if it is free. Our local highschool band chose to pay for sabinoband.com (should have been .org) rather than use the free domain sabinoband.tucson.az.us just because people "are used to .com".
"A gun is a tool, Marian. No better, no worse than any other tool. An axe, a shovel, or anything." Shane (1953)
Yes, I'm posting in response to my own post.
Do people on slashdot understand sarcasm?
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
"Because, if something can make money then it's a crime if it doesn't. Basic premise of our(US) society."
No, it is a $%#@ crime because our society paid through our $%#@ taxes for the research and DNS structure and now they want all this money to put a simple name into a database. If they want to make money on it, they can pay back the 'investment' the society put into it first.
On the flip side, to what end do we want to delineate a site by the geographic location of its server? As the world integrates its services, it shouldn't matter which country is home to the business. Or, in more extreme situations (actually, rather common), a company has offices running in different countries.
The O'Henry twist here is that we want to delineate the net by the type of content being offered. One day, countries will go to war over a scarcity of domain names that are marketable.
Because you can't, you won't, and you don't stop...
Administrative difficulties aside, what's wrong with having .city.state.us for a business which only caters to that city? People are afraid to use them because 1) they don't think the laymen are used to .us, 2) they think that a 4th-level domain lacks quality and 3) they think it's hard to remember. The first and second issues I can't deal with, but would change as people adopt .us. The third I can question however. If I were to live in the US, I'd know my state and my town. Those things I know how to spell, and if more companies were to adopt this scheme, I'd know it like the back of my hand. So that leaves the company name, which since it's local doesn't have to be the overly convoluted .com name because names are not in short supply. Which would you rather have:
slashdot.newyork.ny.us or
newyork-slashdot.org? The difference is only a character or two when you include the down in the domain. The only problem I see here is advertising. They'd have to say the entire domain which could get cumbersome. But at least they'd know how to spell it.
icqqm [ICQ:11952102]
I tried to register a 'lastname.city.md.us' domain about 4 or 5 years ago. The registrar for my area was/is Nametamer.
.us TLD does have cool possibilities but it seems like a couple unresponsive registrars have monopolies over big regions.
I had a terrible experience with them. Took me months to get them to set my domain record to point to my nameservers properly. All the while they were sending me 'you must pay now' emails. I wasn't gonna pay for jack if it they weren't gonna make it work.
Eventually they got it fixed, but by that time I had gotten frustrated and already registered a domain elsewhere.
Keep in mind that this was a long time ago... they could have changed a lot since 1995/1996.
The
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Here is my seeing of the sooth.
.com(.org.edu.net).city.state.US domain structure. State government servers would conform to the .state.US domain structure, and federal government servers conform to the .US structure. This bill will be perfectly legal, as the constitution gives the federal legislature the right (and responsibility) to regulate interstate and international commerce.
.US extension, with the exception of US military bases and foreign embassies. (International commerce)
A bill will be sponsored by both political parties in both the house and senate at the federal level requiring that all web servers in the United States (and territories) conform to the
Of course, all new domain names must conform to the new structures. However, old domain names will have a several year grace period to abandon the "old" structure in favor of the new structure. To make it easier to transition, "legal" domain nameholders will receive tax credit to transition over to the new naming convention. If you want to have a presence in multiple cities and/or states? Simple, place a server in the actual locations.
A side benefit of this would be that all commercial and residential connections to the internet would be easily identifiable through DNS as to what municipality, and state the connection is made. The onus of providing accurate DNS information will reside on the service provider.
At the routers at the geographical borders, checking and filtering will take place to ensure that no servers based outside of the USA are using the
Once all servers and individual connections in the USA are conforming, and non-USA servers are easily identifiable, internet based taxation becomes a no brainer. State and local sales taxes will easily be assessed and levied and distributed to the proper agencies.
A short time later, a bill will be passed requiring all servers rate themselves in meta tags against pornography, violence, language, ETC. The onus of selecting the proper tags will reside on the author of the page. Misapplying or failing to apply the proper rating tags will become a criminal offense.
Since the tags are a government mandated standard, every browser will be required to support them. Again, this would be legal under the guise of interstate commerce.
Almost instantly, local communities will demand censorship based on the geographical information of DNS, and the rating tags. Servers on foreign soil will be blocked carte blanche. Local decency laws will be used as the basis of this demand.
Of course, I could be wrong.
Joe Goldmeer
Yes, I have been called paranoid before.
A true pessimist calls himself a realist, while those that call themselves realists, are in actuality pessimistic.
This localized notation made sense back then, when UUCP was the most common mean of delivery. TCP/IP was a luxury only available at Universities and some of you BBSers remember that the only online community where you could take part privately was thru your local BBSes who in turn used a city based server that was connect to a network (ahem..) like Fidonet, WWIV-Net and the like.
The first and biggest carriers of USENET News and Email outside of University where little UUCP leaf nodes that connect to other local nodes, and if you where lucky, to a connected provider (UUNET, state University...) Back then it did make a lot of sense, since you also used UUCP maps to calculate the best route (huge monsters) and the best times of call.
It just that the use is now obsolete. But I am a bit surprised, are you guys in UNIX for real or just wearing penguins to look cool?
I'll bet they could at least sell toys.r.us.
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The need for a cheap TLD has largely gone away. The major TLDs now actually have competitive registrars, which means we can get domains names with low prices *and* good service. Why not just toss .us in with the other commercial TLDs and
have done with it?
(Of course, please grandfather in those of us who already have our .us domains. :) )
- 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.On the other hand, as fellow tech supporters might agree with me here, it's hard enough getting people to remember to add just .com alone as it is. Seems it's really a no win scenario after all.
When I first started my Omphalos website, I planned on using a Canadian domain - it was free, and I thought it should be easy to register.
When I applied, I came across two problems: first, I could only get "omphalos.vancouver.bc.ca" if I wanted to, because I was not represented by official organizations in more than one province, and second because Omphalos is not a legal entity I was told I could not apply in any case. In other words to even get an address at all I had to have some sort of legal status as an organization or something. This was complete bullshit.
Luckily omphalos.net was easily obtained.
Why would anyone go for a ultralong multidotted and impossible-to-remember national TLD which is hard to obtain, when they can get one of the top 3 so easily? (provided your choice of name is not already taken, granted).
Before national domains become popular for Joe and Jane Average, they need to be administered in such a fashion that they can easily be obtained without having to jump through multiple hoops and meet silly requirements...
I think I should have been able to register omphalos.ca just as easily as omphalos.net.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
And originated in England, a small island off of Europe (THEM). Clue: `murkans didn't invent everything. You'd think you might realise that from the name of the language.
Open Source. Closed Minds. We are Slashdot.
I think the sig said it all
Because .com is for international companies. They want it to point to the same place regardless of where you are geographically. This simple point seems to have evaded most people here. bbc.com is an international company broadcasting to the world. The fact that it is British is irrelevant. Non international companies should be taken off the .com TLD and stuck in their geographical location so that they can be told apart from the international companies that should have the .com TLDs.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
Now, who wouldn't?
That's real catchy.
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
On the other hand, imagine the fun students could have, e.g., at football games: "Who're we cheering for?" "FUCK U.!" "What did you say?" "FUCK U.!" "I can't hear you..." et cetera, et cetera. ;)
Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
I get dobes.vancouver.bc.ca; people who live in vancouver.bc.ca add vancouver.bc.ca, bc.ca, and .ca to their domain suffix search. Then they can use a nice short useful address to find me:
dobes if in vancouver.bc.ca
dobes.vancouver if in bc.ca
dobes.vancouver.bc if only in .ca
So basically you end up with very useful regionalised names.
Now, even though this makes perfect sense, its not done.
Why? Well for one, the internet started under UNIX, which is quite difficult to administrate properly. Thus these domains were not added to people's resolv.conf because they didn't care.
Next thing you know, this naming scheme works for one person but not another... a tech support nightmare! Thus is born the popularity of the .com suffix. It actually works, all of the time.
The localized domains WOULD be much cooler (you wouldn't even have to have .com at the end of a useful word to find something) but unfortunately the internet was setup by hackers who simply didn't care enough about these issues to really do anything about it.
I know my computer doesn't search vancouver.bc.ca or the higher level domains, I might have added .com to my search list though...
What's really needed is to assign every device on the Internet a UUID (universal unique ID) which is a large, partly-random number that incorporates info from the hardware of the particular machine. Then integrate some Napster-like distributed directory service into web browsers, so that every time you log onto the Web you are automatically and globally registered (no propagation time nonsense necessary) in the distributed database via whatever info you want associated with your site (search keywords, topic, geographic location, etc).
Using this method, you are entirely responsible for maintaining how others locate your site. No two UUIDs can be registered into the database at the same time so there are no conflicts. Each UUID is licensed out to a particular server for a certain span of time, just like DHCP and IP addys. No one will be motivated to take over a particular UUID for name recognizability, since they will all be equally gibberish-like. There's no need for commercially-tainted "crawler" search engines since the distributed directory has a built-in search capability. And people with servers that are only up some of the time won't show up as search results while the server is offline, so you won't get a list that contains 20 sites that don't currently exist live on the web.
So let's see--we could put search engines, registrars, ICANN, and many others completely out of business. Hrmm... no wonder no one in control is interested in doing things a better way.
Good luck trying to get anything smart done in this world; there will always be dumber, richer people than you.
- "It's just a matter of opinion!" - PRIMUS
Perhaps the US govt should sell the .us namespace to the highest bidder, based on the convenient presence of the English word "us". That toy company with the weird Cyrillic name would pay a pretty penny for starters, but there are endless possibilities in the "with" second-level alone...
The odd thing is that I'm only half-joking.
-- Life is short. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. ~ Robert Doisneau
Funny, us Canadians have been doing it this way for a long time, with only one domain per person or organization:
- For
.ca:- must be federally incorporated
- must have offices in multiple provinces, or
- have the domain based on a federally registered trademark
- For
.sk.ca (Saskatchewan, Canada):- must be provincially incorporated
- must have offices in multiple cities
- Everyone else can only get cityname.sk.ca - even city/town councils (see city.saskatoon.ca or town.outlook.sk.ca
The result? Very few organizations in Canada have________________________
Corporate Jenga: You take a blockhead from the bottom and you put him on top...
I wonder what would happen to my server if, by chance, I could register slashdot.us...
Heh, I'm clarifying my clarification so I must not be good at this.
I never said it was like murder; I merely meant to suggest that though the GPL restricts personal freedom, the loss of those freedoms might not be a bad thing. It's a good thing that people aren't free to go around killing others. Is it a good thing that people aren't free to distribute GPL'd software without source or include GPL'd code in non-GPL'd projects? I'm being purposely unopinionated here because I don't want to attract any flames, though it appears I'm not any good at that either.
--
And then get sued by the "other" Ed's for trademark infringment.
Sounds like a great opportunity for the standard .com.us and .org.us .. and *ENFORCE* it!
We must absolutely distinguish between the private and commercial realms!
In this case, there is not a distinction between the city and county of San Francisco. The entire area of San Francisco county is incorporated in the City of San Francisco, and they are governed by one body.
I heard ms is planning on a .net platform. However, if the .us TLD will be used more often they might consider a windows us version as well (seems more honest to the users) and they've already got windows me.
Jilles
Thier Lawyer will be occupied for a year with
www.verizon.buttfuck.idaho.us
& what not
other then that its a good idea.
Why becase then bob Smith in whereever can run a web site for him self and not be confused with bob smith any place else.
IF you do not want to go to these sites, you dont have to.
Yes I can not spell...Wait....for a second there I almost cared.
nobodywants.us
--- If OS were buildings, then the first woodpecker to come around would erase 95 % of civilization.
The UN peacekeepers don't seem to be a military organization.. they are a peacekeeping force. If you start saying they are a military force then you are going to get the militia around here very nervous. Oh no! Was that a black unmarked helicopter I just saw flying by.. honey where's my foil hat.. where's my damned foil hat! They're reading my mind with their tempest system as we speak!!! No, keep .mil for the US military and save us all the headaches. Besides, when's the last time you saw UN "peacekeepers" go into a war zone and establish peace? It's usually NATO or the US going at it alone that MAKES the peace in the area and then they send in some blue helmetted guys from Bangledesh to sit around watching for snipers and shuttling food back and forth from the airfields to Sally Strothers' hut. What a demeaning job.
Never mind all these arguments about whether someone can actually manage to have a world-wide domain. If we restrict our sphere of influence to within the US only, it's still easy to understand the popularity of .com: Unlike .us, .com is completely non-regional. The .us TLD is "locality-based": With a few official exceptions, a .us domain deliberately encodes the geographical location of its owner. (See http://www.nic.us/overview.html for details.) If I register a domain under .us, I'm tying the domain (and my email addresses, web site, etc.) to a physical geographical location.
This is silly. The Internet's geography is not required to be congruent with real-life geography; in fact, it often is not. The .uk TLD doesn't work this way; it's possible to get a geographically-neutral domain name within the .uk name space. Ditto for .au.
From a purely practical standpoint, if there's even a remote possibility that I might move--say, from northern NJ to Manhattan--why would I want a domain that encodes my location? If I'm living in Manhattan, I'm probably going to feel a little silly getting my email via mydomain.hoboken.nj.us. By contrast, if I get a .com domain, the domain name doesn't become instantly silly if I change my physical location, because the name itself doesn't reflect my physical location in the first place.
The great thing about them is there are so many to choose from. As someone once said.
.us with SLD of co , ac etc etc so you get for example novell.co.us . Then you realise that this is far too simple. Lets use the state abbreviation as well, so you now have a series of novell.co..us . Obviously the Internet is constrained by state boundaries (front line, DMZ or whatever you call them over there).
.uk to .gb to follow the rest of the world's standards (GB is an ISO thing, UK isn't). I think there is another country that uses a non ISO TLD as well.
.us domain should be relaunched but following the mould the rest of the world uses. That way the .com's .orgs etc could be used for truly international efforts (who would be the final arbitrator for that ?)
.us domain to its users.
The US TLD might be say
While we are at it why not rename
When it comes down to it, the
Finally, when playing the "guess that URL" game adding the twist of "guess the state and then remember its postal abbreviation then add on the nearest town's abbreviation and then pop the zip code on the end" probably doesn't endear the current
In that case, bravo. I spent the weekend at the Notting Hill Carnival in London, and if there's anything that celebrates different cultures it's that.
We'll just have to agree to differ on the old domains issue though...
The real problem is that you currently have to register under a "locality".
I currently live in Milwaukie, Oregon. But I'm two blocks from Portland, I work in Hillsboro, and the company that I run computer systems for is based in Beaverton.
Which one should I register my domain name in? aGenericDomain.milwaukie.or.us?
No thank you... I want a statewide domain. Yup, I want to be able to register aGenericDomain.or.us...
OK I'm really just saying this because I want to be the proud owner of:- them.or.us
-- Under/Overrated is meta-moderation, and therefore is Redundant.
Say I run Ed's Diner in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
.us digraph becomes more
And say it becomes necessary for me to set up a site with my menu and hours and the such. And I want a domain name.
But eds-diner.com is taken.
And I don't want to drive people nuts with
ed-s-diner.com.
I could settle for eds-diner.cambridge.ma.us.
Because for me, the Web is geographic, at
least in this context.
So let's hope the
accessible. It does have a niche it can fill.
It is probably too late in the game to implement but why couldnt .com point to .co.us in the united states and .co.uk on the United Kingdom, etc. As in if a company was an international company like Yahoo!, if someone in the States typed Yahoo.com they would go to yahoo.co.us, if someone in Germany typed yahoo.com they would go to yahoo.co.de, etc
I Don't Work Here
The whole naming system is in a bit of a mess isn't it? But it would be a start to draw a line in the sand and say 'from now on (whenever that is) - we are going to strictly enforce correct usage of names' . The majority of the world uses national identifiers so I think the USA should come in line with the rest of the planet.
In the UK Nominet is strict about who can be called a .net.uk , you have to prove you are a registered charity before they'll let you be a .org.uk , etc. And for sure you have to be a dot something dot uk. Whereas I notice in some countries this isn't a requirement, in the Netherlands for excample, I used to work with the Technical University at Delft - http://www.tudelft.nl .
..And the American system where you choose a dot something without anybody checking if you really are a .net or a .org or a .com, (though at least .edu is looked after) but are assumed to be global... causes me a real nightmare when I find a cool tshirt on the web but when I go to order find I've got to double the price for postage and wait for six weeks before it arrives...
Seems like people should be paying attention to some sort of standard here (Educate me, tell me what it is...).
Quick, where do you go and what is the procedure to register yourdomain.yourtown.yourstate.us ? Or if more appropriate yourdomain.yourstate.us?
I have no idea in my case. None of the reasonable choices .ga.us resolve, and www.atlanta.ga.us just waits forever for the server. (other reasonable .atlanta.ga.us don't rsolve.).
In order to be popular, it must first be possable, second, it must be easy. The place to register can't be i.want.to.register.a.domain.name.thingy.farm.burea u.local.division.of.ga.atlanta.ga.us