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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
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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.
all.you.base.are.belong.to.us
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