NeuStar to Manage .US Registry

flatt writes: "The US Government picked NeuStar, the managers of the upcoming .biz registry, to manage the .us registry today. NeuStar has made a press release and there's an AP article over at Excite about it. Finally a country code that I'll register in." This has been brewing for a long time, and has been criticized as a giveaway.

Comments

Changes We Are Seeing

[Renraku]

Money and business runs this country. Is it any coincidence that the company responsible for .biz is also responsible for .us? Is this a sign?

Excite article...

[CmdrTroll]

The excite link was slashdotted but here is a summary of what it said:

• The registry will go on-line on December 15th, 2001
• Neustar will be partially subsidized by the US government, and will charge users $5/domain/year for .us domains
• Neustar will be selling x.509 certificates (similar to what Verisign does) for .us domains for $75/domain/year. They have a deal with Thawte that allows them to use the Thawte certificates in most browsers today.
• Pre-registration starts November 30th, 2001, at www.neustar.us

-CT

Re:Excite article...

[1010011010]

What about us folks that are already registrars for .US domains?

It was understood in the past that delegations were to be free. How about now? I don't intend to charge for them in my "teeming metropolis" (cough), but what about others? What's the policy? Will I have my domain revoked? Will I be charged for it? Can I get myname.us?

Cool

[_typo]

Based in Washington DC, NeuStar operates the authoritative registry of all North American telephone numbers and administers the database, which all North American carriers rely upon to route billions of telephone calls daily.

These guys are cool!

What kind of hardware is this? Someone here know anything about these things?

An International Internet

[Embedded Geek]

So, is this (the use of .US domains) going to be a step towards a more international Internet, even a baby step?

I know that people (esp in the mainstream press) marvel at how global the Internet is, but the fact is that it is inherently biased towards people in the US. Personally, unless I have reason to think otherwise (e.g. oxford.edu, moscowballet.org, airfrance.com, etc) I (incorrectly) tend to assume that a domain is on my side of the pond (or Pacific, or Canadian or Mexican border). It strikes me as unfair that a business running in the UK realistcally has to grab both .co.uk and .com domains to be sure that they reach their (UK) customers while I could simply buy eds-taco-palace.com and everyone knows it's in the States.

On the gripping hand... if we are entering an era of U.S. hedgmony, perhaps this skewed view is appropriate. After all, if the Romans had the Internet, would they have confided themselves to a ".rmn" country code?

PS - Random thought - imagine IP addresses in Rome: ccv.xcv.xxx.ii. But then they'd have had to cross the Atlantic and conquer the Aztecs to get zero and make it work...

Re:An International Internet

[kimihia]

Good post.

The reason for choosing an international domain over a local domain has two reasons:

• People are too dumb to remember the ccTLD. When I say my website is at "kimihia.org.nz", most people take that to mean my website is at "kimihia.org". I did register the .org TLD version for one of my websites because that was where a large portion of my visitors were arriving from.
• People are too dumb to realise the net is international. How many times do you have to explain that yes, anybody anywhere (*) can host a .nz domain, and anybody anywhere can access a .nz domain? It isn't just limited (like most consumer's minds) to one country!

* Unless you are unable to get a 'net connection from where you are. :-)

"Dot-US" and XRP/BEEP data point

[Kris Magnusson]

Note that the article stated that the NeuLevel subsidiary will share some of the security and technical developments used in ".biz."

Hopefully one of these shared technical developments will be the reuse of the eXtensible Registry Protocol (XRP), which is defined as a profile for the Internet-standard BEEP framework. NeuStar used hardened implementations of the BEEP framework, called "Beepcore," that my former employer Invisible Worlds developed under contract.

I don't know of any open source implementations for XRP, but these Beepcore implementations are available as free software under a BSD-style license at Beepcore.org.

............ kris

Kris Magnusson
(formerly marketing and developer relations manager for Invisible Worlds)

Re:The point of country TLD's

[mpe]

I was always under the impression that the country TLD's were meant to be used for sites that had geography-specific information. Such as city government sites, or a store that is in one city.

The vast majority of business is geographically (according to either physical or political geography) based. Though the scale of course varies..

The example "clothingstore.los-angeles.ca.us" given was a good example, but now they want to make it "clothingstore.us"? Doesn't that pretty much defeat the point?

The point has already been defeated, by "mom and pops" winding up with .coms. Problem is that the people doing this are those handling the registration.