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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?"
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
- - - - -
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
icannisfucking.us!
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/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
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.
all.you.base.are.belong.to.us
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