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The Great .us Giveaway
An Anonymous Coward writes: "ICANNWatch has a story about why the US Dept. of Commerce's plan to give away .us is a Really Bad Idea. Bids are fixed at $0, so the public gets nothing, but the contractor can charge what he likes for .us names, he can tie in other services, and pretty much do what he likes, except .us has to have rules that favor trademarks, and do what ICANN says. Plus it's set up so Verisign has the inside track. It's all in a paper by Brian Kahin called Making Policy by Solicitation: The Outsourcing of .us (MS Word, but ICANNWatch put up a .pdf). Last week public interest groups asked for a delay of the giveaway, but will anyone listen?"
Well, dumbass, the Internet was created/invented in the U.S. and, at the time, there were no other countries on the 'net. It was used for the most part by academic institutions and the government in the very early years and most had no idea it would grow outside the bounds of the U.S. So, American elitism? I think not. More like common sense and utility. Why make it navy.mil.us when there's no need (at the time) for .us--just makes it longer! Once it the Internet became an international network, it was obvious something had to be done, so all of the top-level country code domains were added...but why go back and change all of the established .gov, .mil, .com, etc. sites to .gov.us, etc.? Because it would have been disruptive to the flow of information and a lot of trouble.
For all of their flaws, ICANN is in fact a non-profit organization. They may be in the pockets of corporations, but it seems to be largely because they don't know any better, not because they're personally profiting directly. And I don't see how they're going to get any money for .us "hosts" under this scheme.
Actually you could use [ssn].[first].[last].us. Athough SSNs are not unique, no SSN should be assigned to two people with the same name. (But what happens if you wish to change your name, and your chosen name happens to be that of someone who shares your SSN?) Unfortunately, there are still people who believe that SSNs are secret and will accept them as proof of identity. :-(
There's already a system for this, and it doesn't involve having other people do the work for you and getting it wrong. You can define a list of domains to search under before interpreting a domain name as absolute. The downside, of course, is that the search may take some time.
Under Unix you can put a line in your resolv.conf file like this: "search fr com". Under Windows you can enter "DNS suffixes" of "fr" and "com" somewhere in the TCP/IP configuration dialogs. Then www.coca-cola will resolve to www.coca-cola.fr while www.superpages will resolve to www.superpages.com since there is no www.superpages.fr.
Yes, I'm very aware of the election scam. But, what happened? This was supposed to be a democratic state, not a corporate state. Does everyone just not care, or just unsure what to do about it? Voting doesn't seem to be the answer.
Maybe the goatse.cx guy could get the domain an.us?
prosebeforehos.com
It may be long, but I've never forgotten it, and it's been very useful in the past. (Metro North New Haven Line!)
.com has been.
I actually used http://www.state.ma.us/ this morning to check on Basic Cable rate regulation.
They're useful and logical domains, and I hope they're not abused like
No, the solution is to do just the reverse. Eliminate the .COM, .ORG, .NET, etc. domains altogether. Rely solely on country codes for the TLDs.
{But that's crazy talk!}
No it isn't, despite the fact that I seem to be talking to myself. Moving everything to the country TLDs allows domain registry, trademark disputes, and other ickiness to be handled on a country-by-country basis.
Each country is owner of its own domain, and can do whatever they want with it. Guidelines should be suggested, such as "try to put commercial entities in ".co.xx", but countries would be free to modify these guidelines as they see fit. And if some country wants to out-source its registry, or even sell rights to the domain outright, great. It's their domain. They get exactly one. They can use it however they wish.
Yes, this means that multi-national corporations would have to register in each country in which they want a cyberspace presence. Boo-hoo. It's not like they're not registering every TLD they can get their hands on already. So, the Coca-Cola corporation would have to register "cocacola.co.fr", "cocacola.co.uk", "cocacola.co.us", etc. And if they're smart, each one of these points to localized versions of their home page. No more "cocacola.com". Users all over the world can expect to see pages in their own languages. What a concept.
The biggest win is that trademark issues are resolved in the jurisdiction in which they occur. Say that the Scottish sheep farmer Angus McDonald registers "mcdonalds.co.uk". Now a certain multi-national fast-food restaurant wants the name. Who decides? With "mcdonalds.com" it's unclear what the legal jurisdiction is. With "mcdonalds.co.uk" it's perfectly clear that the courts of the United Kingdom need to settle the matter.
But that solution wouldn't generate anywhere near as much revenue for ICANN, so it'll never be done...
Chelloveck
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
When I need information about a state service, I start with www.state.xx.us where xx is the state. I've used www.state.ny.us, www.state.il.us and www.state.in.us in just the last month.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
The .us domain has been under used mainly because of the way it is currently organized, which create mile long addresses. For this reason most US companies would rather use the .com domain. I strongly believe that the .us domain needs to be made the great American domain, whereby universities and government organizations are also encouraged to use it. The way I see it, any two letters domains following .us should be for the states, as it is at the moment and then we should use top level style 3 letter domains for nation wide stuff. Examples:
.mil, .edu, and .gov TLDs would then be disbanded since they would no longer have any use.
oh.us - Ohio
ca.us - California
com.us - USA commerical zone
edu.us - USA educational institutions
gov.us - USA government
mil.us - USA miltary
The
This may be a bit off topic, but unless the domain is improved giving it away free will not encourage it to be used to its full extent.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I'll have to get an "us" domain. There's too many great possibilities to pass up.
For instance, a great second level domain would be "with.us". Then you could resell all the commercially useful third level domains: bank.with.us, shop.with.us, save.with.us, fly.with.us.
But there's loads of other great possibilities. You read them here first:
x.the.us (rebuild.the.us, destroy.the.us, network.the.us, educate.the.us, subvert.the.us, love.the.us, hate.the.us, fuck.the.us)
x.is.us / x.is.not.us
x.r.us (but toys.r.us will get you slapped for trademark violation.)
x.for.us (linux.for.us, beer.for.us, games.for.us, cars.for.us, software.for.us)
why.not.us, remember.us, its.on.us, kill.us, dont.forget.us, buy.us, fly.us, rent.us, sell.us, silly.us, sucks.to.be.us, computers.for.the.rest.of.us
Quick! Rush out and reserve your us domain today!
But which is better? free.beer.for.us or free.speech.for.us?
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Toys'R'Us actually 0wns the trademarks for hundreds of *'r'Us names.
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Unfortunately, .us is incredibly hard to use at the moment. It's not because of the decentralized nature of the system as it currently exists. It's because service from Verisign/Network "Solutions" absolutely, no-two-ways-about-it, sucks. It sucks rocks through a hose.
.us domain; the phone number given for .us domain inquries plays a recorded message saying all correspondance must be done through email (see broken "procedure" above)
They have made it intentionally difficult to use. For instance, I've been trying to give up a delgation given to me years about for a bout a year now. Neither I nor the town who would like the domain is able to get satisfaction from Network "Solutions."
Sounds like the problem is actually lack of decenralisation. If you actually had a system which was decentralised then your town wouldn't be dealing with Verisign/NS at all, they'd be dealing with the state government to agree their third level domain (and you'd agree your fourth level domain with your local government.)
They're nearly impossible to make. The name server listed as master for the holly-springs.nc.us domain and the domain I was trying to relenquish has to move. The company it's hosted at went bankrupt and I have no idea how long I'll have use of that server's IP address. But www.nic.us -- now a Network "Solutions" "Service" -- requires email to be sent in; does not pre-fill the web form that generates the email form; responds to the request in 4-6 weeks, even if it's just to say that a field in the form was wrong (which prefilling would take care of); no one at Network "Solutions" knows about the
If things were set up correctly in the first place then you'd be dealing with hostmaster@nc.us anyway. What is really worrying is that the people in charge appear to have missed the whole point...
But yeah, in general, the forced geographical naming does make things inconvenient for anyone other than state/city governments and individual users.
Odd that this simply isn't an issue when it comes to postal addresses or telephone numbers. Though in most parts of the world, including the US, you can get telephone numbers which are from a different area or country wide. These tend to cost extra money. Similarly you can have post forwarded from one address to another.
Why should domain naming be treated differently?
The internet would be worthless if only the US was allowed to use it.
But not if the US was absent from it.
The value of the internet has absolutly nothing to do with the cost of creating it, or who paid for it.
Most of the connectivity to the US (with the possible exception of that between the US and Canada) isn't paid for by the US in the first place...
Well, dumbass, the Internet was created/invented in the U.S. and, at the time, there were no other countries on the 'net.
How long did that persist for? It was invented for Military use, which would mean it wouldn't take long before there were connections to Canada, Greenland and the UK. Remember most of BMEWS is located outside the US and IIRC operated by NORAD which is US/Canadian.
Once it the Internet became an international network, it was obvious something had to be done, so all of the top-level country code domains were added.
Plenty of country codes date from when it was still "ARPAnet". We are going back over a decade, long before the "The Internet" had ever been heard of by most people, before HTTP had ever been invented...
When the top-level country domain names were enacted, to change all of the .edu, .gov., etc. to .edu.us, etc. would require a massive amount of time, effort, and money
It might require a huge amount of work NOW considerably greater than about 15 years ago.
Many of these domains simply didn't exist 15 years ago, most of them didn't exist even 5 years ago.
-All remote "links" would have had to have been changed across the *entire* Internet--albeit smaller than it is today. When I say links I mean html links, gopher links (or whatever they're called as gopher was popular then), and various other protocols
HTTP came along much later
Massive updates to all DNS servers, at all levels
Only those in one country since the rest of the planet used geographic domains from the start. (Even networks such as JANET managed to communicate with the rest of the world, dispite there not being any agreement between networks on which way around to have the name...)
There's been a lot of talk about adding new TLDs as if that would help anything, when the problem is that the TLD that should be one of the most common ones is hardly used at all:
.us page. There are shitloads of .com sites that most decidedly serve only Americans and should therefore logically be placed under the .us domain.
Nor will adding new TLD's help when people insist on everything being www.foobar.com or www.foobar.*
I don't think I've ever visited a
Or more likely only serve some Americans you'd think companies in Alaska and Hawaii would actually want to use geograpic domains. You even have one US city hijacking another country's domain (maybe anywhere bombed by the USA needs to get a strong grip on their domain name.)
No, Verisign is "working" to screw that up as well. See my previous post.
.us DNS name server delegation records, then the second-level domain is unusable.
If the second-level DNS servers cannot be contacted because Network "Solutions" refuses to update the
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Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Step 1. Call the phone number on nic.us.
.us domain.
Step 2. Call Verisign. Chase your way around that company until you have confirmed that no one is willing to help with the
Step 3. Call the Department of Commerce and/or your representive and senators.
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Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
The NTIA publication
.us top level domain, or November 10, 2001, whichever comes first, NSI shall continue to provide administrative services, including Registry and, as appropriate, Registrar services, for this domain. Such services shall be at no cost to the U.S. Government, except that the Department shall reimburse NSI for the 1999-2000 contribution to ICANN attributed to the .us top-level domain.
.us domain (except as may be reasonably necessary to comply with customary business practices and to minimize or mitigate risks), and, unless directed by the Department, shall not alter the registration policies of the .us domain. NSI shall have no obligation to develop or prepare any new documentation with respect to its administration of the .us domain. If NSI, however, develops such new documentation, NSI shall provide such documentation (other than internal drafts, memoranda, and working papers) to the Department upon the Department's request. Moreover, NSI shall provide, upon the Department's request, any information or documentation regarding administration of the .us domain that the Department reasonably deems necessary to secure a successor registry.
.us registration data, NSI shall have no obligation to verify or validate the completeness and/or accuracy of the data provided to NSI by the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California. NSI will use the existing constellation of secondary .us DNS servers to propagate the .us top level domain zone files, to the extent that the volunteer top-level domain server administrators agree to continue such operation, and reliability and stability of the .us domain are not jeopardized. NSI will use commercially reasonable efforts to replace any volunteer top-level domain server administrator that elects to discontinue service. NSI will not be held either responsible or liable for any consequences related to the actions or failure to perform by any of the volunteer .us top-level domain server administrators.
.us domain. Such cooperation shall include timely transfer to the successor registry of an electronic copy of the then-current top-level domain registration date and, to the extent such information is available, specification of the format of the data. Upon receipt of written acknowledgment by the successor registry that it has accepted full and complete responsibility for all tasks associated with administering the .us domain, the Department will concurrently relieve, release, and discharge NSI from any responsibility for administering the .us domain.
.us domain consistent with Federal acquisition law or regulations.
"SPECIAL AWARD CONDITIONS, NCR 92-1874, Amendment Number Twenty-One (21)" is as follows:
1. Section I. B. 11. Other Top Level Domains of Amendment 19, as amended, is amended as follows:
.us Top Level Domain
Until such time as the Department of Commerce ("Department") designates a successor registry for the
As administrator, NSI shall use commercially reasonable efforts to maintain the status quo with respect to the operational policies, practices, procedures, administration, and daily operations of the
As custodian of the
Upon designation by the Department of a successor registry, or November 10, 2001, whichever comes first, NSI shall use commercially reasonable efforts to cooperate with the Department to facilitate the smooth transition of operation of the
Nothing in this Amendment is intended to preclude NSI from seeking or obtaining the rights to function as the successor registry for the
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Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Does anyone know who uses .US now? And why is it America has not used this TLD like most other countries have had to do? (IE: www.myDomain.or.jp, etc.)
.us is incredibly hard to use at the moment. It's not because of the decentralized nature of the system as it currently exists. It's because service from Verisign/Network "Solutions" absolutely, no-two-ways-about-it, sucks. It sucks rocks through a hose.
.us domain; the phone number given for .us domain inquries plays a recorded message saying all correspondance must be done through email (see broken "procedure" above).
I do (see email address). My town does. All k-12 schools do.
Unfortunately,
They have made it intentionally difficult to use. For instance, I've been trying to give up a delgation given to me years about for a bout a year now. Neither I nor the town who would like the domain is able to get satisfaction from Network "Solutions." So, I just set the domain back up on my servers and provided the delegation.
Which bring me to the second problem: updates. They're nearly impossible to make. The name server listed as master for the holly-springs.nc.us domain and the domain I was trying to relenquish has to move. The company it's hosted at went bankrupt and I have no idea how long I'll have use of that server's IP address. But www.nic.us -- now a Network "Solutions" "Service" -- requires email to be sent in; does not pre-fill the web form that generates the email form; responds to the request in 4-6 weeks, even if it's just to say that a field in the form was wrong (which prefilling would take care of); no one at Network "Solutions" knows about the
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Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
We've been trying to deal with Verisign for 6 months on several community applications, to no avail in every case.
Verisign has been effective in stalling on every application, usually by taking 6-8 weeks to reply with an incorrect response like citing lack of authorization for the community (which was sent with the application). After you receive the erroroneous response and send a note to them pointing out their error, they take another 6-8 weeks to send a response saying "contact the community domain administrator for assistance" (which is what we would be if they'd get their act together).
All Verisign's efforts have done is fully alienate each community (we do a good job letting folks know who's botched up the job) and given them a reputation as a company to avoid like the plague.
We had a hunch the stalling tactic had another purpose...
*scoove*
Who can get a US domain name?
Individuals, organizations, businesses, city/county governments, Native Sovereign Nations, schools (K-12, private, community colleges), libraries, state agencies, and museums may obtain a US domain name.
Examples:
Jane Doe in Canoga Park, CA = jane-doe.canoga-park.ca.us
Bob's Shoe Shop in Toledo, OH = bobs-shoe-shop.toledo.oh.us
City Hall in New Orleans, LA = ci.new-orleans.la.us
Monroe School District in MT = monroe.k12.mt.us
Can I register something.us? .us.
No. See the examples above and read the Overview section of the Web site for complete information on the structure of the US Domain. Domain names are constructed with organization-name or personal-name followed by the city-name, the state-code, and
How much does it cost? .us domain names by the US Domain Registry may charge a nominal fee
The US Domain Registry does not charge any fees. Organizations approved to register
Tony
icannisfucking.us!
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/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
Let's face it, ICANN is a business. Even if they don't get money for the control of the domain name, someone is gonna be paying for buying .us hosts, and I would guess ICANN gets a share of the profits. Any business (especially the king of the .com's, which is what ICANN pretty much is) would be trying to get as much money as possible. The only question is how much abuse is going to occur because of this, not whether or not it will happen.
I am !amused.
Perhaps a similar scheme could be adopted for .us
All the major multinationals in the UK have a .co.uk as well as a .com, all universities have had .ac.uk for ages, and the others are gaining in popularity now as well.
This is the way it is supposed to work now. Joe's Pizza in Plano, in theory, can get joespizza.plano.tx.us for free. In practice, however, it's quicker and easier just to get joespizzaplano.com.
As for the free websites thing.. don't we have it already, and it isn't it called Geocities? It's not like people are in dire need of 10Mb online storage space.
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Each state has total control over it's own portion of
I fear the disruption that will occur when
(And just to kick in my own idea for a cool
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
How about preparing for the future now? Use truly fully qualified names: myname.country.planet.solar_system.galaxy.universe
myname.us.earth.sol.milky_way.universe
Edward Burr
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
Does anyone know who uses .US now? And why is it America has not used this TLD like most other countries have had to do? (IE: www.myDomain.or.jp, etc.)
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
Wouldn't it be nice if someone setup a system for everyone to have a hostname in their birthstate? It wouldn't take much of a data center to manage it either. Give everyone an email account and 10 to 20MB of space. There would have to be more identification in the host/domain to avoid overlaps, but I think it can be done. Maybe [first][middle][last][birthyear].city.state.us.
johnwilliamdoe2001.dallas.tx.us
Hey, I'd take it if it was free!
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
This is a valid argument only if this were to happen today. When .MIL and .GOV were created, there was no such thing as a country code. .EDU and .COM weren't even delegated to anybody when .MIL started up. The "internet" was really just a connection of researchers and US governmental institutes. This isn't an example of American elitism, or even a matter of America-centric thought -- the simple fact is, the internet started as an American government entity. That's why we have .MIL and .GOV.
As you admit, you're American. Therefore, you visit a lot of websites that have an American presence (you probably don't visit too many Dutch farmers news sites, or?). When people fill out those forms, you want to make it easy for them. So, you put the country as the default for what most of your visitors are going to be. And on .DE sites, Germany is the top country. In .CO.UK sites, England or UK is going to be the default country.
Being an American and seeing the US chosen by default validates this point. How many times has another country shown up that you had to change it? I would venture you're not visiting too many Syrian sites where US was the default country. One the other hand, how annoying is it to find that you had to search a list of 200+ countries to find the US sandwiched somewhere between the United Arab Emirates and Uraguay, when you're on a site in English by a company that has a large American presence. At the very least, most companies put their top markets right at the top of the list so that the majority of their users don't have to take much effort searching through a list, whether that list is US & Canada or UK, Scotland, Ireland, etc.
How do I become a contractor and get to redistribute these things? Microsoft.us is going to the trademark holder alright, but they're going to pay, and I'm going to include web hosting services on Linux in the deal.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
This is another example in case anyone is wondering what that term means. There are several ways to contact The Department of Commerce to tell them what you think, (check the bottom of the page).
I wanted to get the contact up quick to make sure people saw it, but after finishing the professor's paper, I don't see the DOC's role as implied by the submitted story. It looks to like the people to send gripes to are at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (rdesilva@ntia.doc.gov), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology
So does this mean, for example, that the website for the City of Phoenix, Arizona (www.ci.phoenix.az.us) could be found guilty of infringing a BIOS manufacturer's trademark? And the trademark holder is granted preference in a domain name dispute?
I'll bet the case would get thrown out before it even got to www.supreme.state.az.us.
It would be nice if .com, .org, .net weren't location specific. So if I were using a French ISP typing in cocacola.com would resolve to cocacola.co.fr, and if I were in the states cocacola.com would resolve to cocacola.co.us. The French site would have english and french available, the american site would be in english. If I wanted to look at the american site from a french isp i'd just type in cocacola.co.us. Kind of like dialing a phone number, if I don't dial a country code first, then I'm dialing within my own country, otherwise I dial a country code to get to that country. I guess hindsight is 20-20. I'm thirsty now.
Help find a cure for cancer!
So VeriSign may get control of the .us TLD. They may be assholes about fees and services in .us, but they probably won't be able to touch existing lower-level domains. So while registering a mywebsite.us may require bending over, registering mywebsite.fl.us or mywebsite.ca.us or any other of the 50-some-odd state, district, and territory domains still controlled by the state/district/territory/whatever governments will still be the same.
all.you.base.are.belong.to.us
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OpenNIC is a nice alternative to ICANN's tyranny. It's complementary to the existing structure, too. (New TLD's don't conflict, so you can use both at the same time.) Wouldn't you like a .geek website?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Because what takes a private individual or foreign country to do in 1 year, it takes the U.S. government to do in 5 years.
I am curious to read just how hard federal government workers work.
"There ought to be limits to freedom"