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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.
Webmasters please bear that in mind next time you have drop down dialogue boxes for "country" which include "United Kingdom"
Rich
www.tapeworm.com?
Rich
Back then, there was a lot more cooperation and a lot less commercialism.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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
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.
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
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).
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?
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
If you think the residents of .gov and .mil are going to move without a fight, dream on. It would be extremely expensive and complicated. The USA .com residents would fight a move by keeping it in court for the next 20 years.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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.
You know, 'them'.
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
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
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
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
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!
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.
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.
--
I guess you'd have to settle for .int. He's the oft-forgotten little brother in the tld world.
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."
I would have made that same comment had he said +44 was the code for england, however, i was going to let that one slide because: 1) If you want to call Scotland, +44 IS what you dial 2) Alex G. Bell was a scotsman. 3) how rare it it that someone makes that mistake. and finally. Scotland RULES! (And thank you for moderating me offtopic)
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
cool idea please.save.us (Lifeboat manufacturer) come.with.us (FBI) gotothebackoftheb.us (Ku Klux Klan) help.us (United Way Charities)
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
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Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
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
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Unfortunately, .int is only open to international treaty organisations. That's why .int is often forgotten- because almost nobody can use it.
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
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
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
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
No, the USA has country code 1 becuase AT&T (formerly known as American Telephone and Telegraph) assigned the numbers. Go fig.
You ... You mean ... New York City isn't the center of the universe?
And your maps of the world, with the USA in the centre, which means the break has to come somewhere in India. Everyone else puts the break in the middle of the Pacific, where it doesn't matter, but that would put the USA off on the edge, can't have that ...
That's funny. I live in the USA, and none of my maps look like that (well, ok, the USA is pretty centered on my maps of North America). I remember the maps in school splitting along the Pacific, too. Where did you get this data point?
Interesting trivia point: They tried to make us use metric. They ever passed laws. The unwashed masses wouldn't go along, and the govt seems to have given up.
-- I'm not evil, I'm
. . . 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.
Ahem. Make that "organizations established by international treaties between governments or Internet infrastructure databases".
tpc.int is the latter- it's a database of fax servers.
His proposed domain: www.ph34r.us.
Perhaps he should've read the US domain overview or very first bullet of the registration instructions then. You certainly don't have to be a business, or any sort of organization... I've got a domain under austin.tx.us, and I'm just some guy with a few computers.
Oops.
.com.us.
.co seems strange to me anyway.
.org.uk, and .net.uk, but .co.uk rather that .com.uk.
.com.uk - I know Australia uses .com.au.
Sorry, my bad. Sorry Colorado.
Yeah - like zorba says - just use
Yeah I don't get the two letter system myself.
The
I'm English, and we have
I prefer
I think 'co' may be an existing abreviation for company. Anyone know why we use 'co' not 'com'?
cya,
G
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?
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>
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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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.#define XENOPHOBIC_RANT_MODE ON
...
...... :-)
So that would explain why the US has country code 1, because Alexander Graham Bell was... no wait a minute, Scotland has country code 44.
And then there's the curious fact that everywhere else in the world, longitude East is positive, (as you would expect from the usual Cartesian coordinate system) and West is negative, but in US maps, West is positive.
And your maps of the world, with the USA in the centre, which means the break has to come somewhere in India. Everyone else puts the break in the middle of the Pacific, where it doesn't matter, but that would put the USA off on the edge, can't have that
And time zones, elsewhere time zones are expressed as GMT +- offset, which would make east coast USA GMT-6, but most US software expresses time zones as the offset to be added to local time to get GMT, thus making the good ol' US of A in the positives.
Then there's your curious attachment to a system of measurement that even the stick-in-the-mud English have abandoned (hello NASA, are you listening ?)
And don't even start me on US spelling
#define XENOPHOBIC_RANT_MODE OFF
There, I feel much better now.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
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
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
Great suggestion:
.com domain, that was changed to a .co.us, would immediately snap up .com back up.
.com to .co.us, then wait at least 6 months before they put .com back on the market. They should put up a site telling people to update their links, and make all presently registered .coms point at that.
.co.us would hopefully stay their, because by this time US comsumers would hopefully have got used to looking for companies under .co.us, rather than .com.
One alteration.
The problem with this, would be that everyone who owned a
Why? because all the links pointing to their site would be broken, and all their customers would know that URL.
ICANN should give people 3 months warning, change
Then, companies who should be under
G
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
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
GB=basically England, Scotland and Wales and is an island
UK includes Northern Ireland and some other bits and pieces scattered around the world.
Rich
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.
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.
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
And what about e-mail addresses, and domains already existing in .co.us (Colorado)? Renaming .com to .co.us isn't at all practical.