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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.
Now I can get my dream domain, VALinux.biz!
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
But people are already complaining about it being slashdotted. So here's the excite AP story.
... American identification is of
...
NEW YORK (AP) - Patriotism is about to get easier online.
The Commerce Department selected NeuStar Inc. on Monday to run
domain names ending in ".us." With the announcement comes the
ability to get non-geographic addresses such as
"clothingstore.us," rather than the more cumbersome
"clothingstore.los-angeles.ca.us."
The new rules, expected to take effect early next year, are
designed to get more use out of ".us." Country code suffixes such as ".fr" for France have been sources of national pride
worldwide, but in the United States it is the forgotten stepchild compared with ".com."
NeuStar officials are hoping to change that attitude and said
recent terrorism events may give ".us" even more of a boost.
"The fact is right now,
increased importance," said Jeff Ganek, NeuStar's chairman and
chief executive.
Also Monday, the department announced a five-year agreement with
Educause, a nonprofit consortium, to run the ".edu" suffix.
Community colleges will be able to claim ".edu" names
beginning Nov. 12. In the past, ".edu" was limited primarily to four-year colleges and universities in the United States.
The ".us" domain name will be restricted to U.S. residents and
companies or organizations that operate in the United States,
though the system will rely partly on self-certification and isn't
foolproof.
Many details also remain unresolved.
Public-interest groups worry that ".us" - historically the
domain of state or local governments, nonprofit organizations and schools - will become yet another frontier dominated by commercial
interests.
"A lot of people are very supportive of opening `.us' for more
commercial, small business and individual use," said Alan Davidson, associate director for the Center for Democracy and
Technology. "What's tricky is how you make sure the policies
are fair and equitable."
NeuStar officials said existing ".us" users will get to keep
their names, and local entities that now assign geographically oriented names like "anyname.los-angeles.ca.us" can continue
doing so.
In addition, a number of names have been set aside, including
"kids.us" as a possible children's channel and "parks.us" as a
central resource for parks in the United States.
The company will establish a policy advisory council to address
usage issues, said James Casey, NeuStar's director of policy and
business development. The council's composition and other details
are still pending.
In the past, ".us" policy was handled by the University of
Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, which delegated assignments of specific names to some 800 individuals and
organizations.
To accommodate the distributed assignments, names became long
and cumbersome. It was also difficult to figure out where to go to
get them. Though businesses were allowed to claim ".us" names,
few did.
The change in ".us" is separate from last year's decision by
the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to create
seven Internet suffixes to relieve overcrowding in ".com."
A NeuStar subsidiary, NeuLevel Inc., is the operator of
".biz," one of the new suffixes. NeuStar's ".us" database will
share some of the security and technical developments being used in
".biz."
NeuStar, based in Washington, D.C., also runs databases of area
codes and telephone prefixes for the nation's phone system.
The Commerce contract with NeuStar will run four years, with
options for two one-year extensions
WikiAfterDark.com It's a sex wiki, go now!
The Government actually has to hire a company to restore damaged registry files. That makes me want to *puke*
*Homer J. Simpson pronouncing 'Uruguay'*
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.