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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 **
Webmasters please bear that in mind next time you have drop down dialogue boxes for "country" which include "United Kingdom"
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
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.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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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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
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...
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.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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!
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.