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NeuStar to Manage .US Registry

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the slashdot.us-is-a-little-too-literal dept.

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.

14 of 217 comments (clear)

  1. Excite article... by CmdrTroll · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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

    1. Re:Excite article... by 1010011010 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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?

      --
      Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
    2. Re:Excite article... by scoove · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Exactly the case here. Verisign's rules specified that one could not use a community domain unless they were doing business in the community and were authorized.

      We met both conditions and yet the squatter (that wasn't even within 300 miles of here and wanted extortion rates) who was never authorized by the community was both registered and extended grandfather rights in violation of Verisign policy by Verisign. We became quickly aware that Verisign simply wanted to destroy .us since it wasn't able to make money off of it.

      What about complaints to Verisign? Try filing one... they take 6 weeks (no exaggeration) to respond, always with a form letter either with useless advice that doesn't apply, or statements of the obvious like "in order to register in this subdomain, please contact the subdomain administrator" - yea, call the squatters to complain about them squatting.

      I'm confident there are thousands of others like us that were willing to handle subdomain registration at no expense (same as running primary & secondary dns for folks), but because Verisign hozed it up, we'll have another landrush feeding a government-granted monopoly.

      It's little different than granting the railroads land to sell in Wyoming, Nebraska, Utah, etc., except after they were inhabited...

      *scoove*

      p.s. If you're not happy with the situation, be sure to add Verisign to your "banned vendor" list and make the Internet a better place.

  2. Now! Register your domains! by afree87 · · Score: 4, Funny
    http://dont.slashdot.us/

    http://please.kug.us/

    h ttp://nimda.vir.us/

    1. Re:Now! Register your domains! by TeknoHog · · Score: 5, Funny
      all.your.base.are.belong.to.us

      (no http:// coz I fail to understand what it has to do with domain names)

      --
      Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
  3. new TLD's by rossdee · · Score: 5, Funny

    "The US Government picked NeuStar, the managers of the upcoming .biz registry, to manage the .us registry today."

    So will there also be a .them TLD ?

  4. Hey, I've got an idea! by Anml4ixoye · · Score: 3, Funny

    Let's just open up every single TLD to whoever wants to take it! No reason .edu should mean that it is a university, or that .org should be an organization, or that any of the TLDs should stay what they were meant for!

    I can see it now. We are already having to fight over two TLD's (one that was squatted (.com) and one that was given to the wrong people (.co.hillsborough.fl.us). Now we are going to have to buy and maintain 17 seperate web addresses just to point them all to one server so that people can find us. Great! Can't wait!

    I know this has been mentioned before, but what is the point of opening up the TLDs? Companies are just going to have to buy the ones (or sue to steal them back) that infringe upon them. So why not leave them alone?

    --
    Random Musings
  5. An International Internet by Embedded+Geek · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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...

    --

    "Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."

  6. "Dot-US" and XRP/BEEP data point by Kris+Magnusson · · Score: 4, Interesting
    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)

    --
    "I thought I could organize freedom. How Scandinavian of me."
  7. .us domain by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The main reasons I've really liked the .us domain is 1) it's free; and 2) assignment of domain names is completely local and decentralized. The guy in charge of administering my records lives here in the same town as I, and has been real quick about changin ip associations when I've needed to do so (like 2-hour turnaround). I've been using my domain (bullcreek.austin.tx.us -- i'm not an anonymous coward, I just don't like registering) for many years now. Not sure I like the idea of paying 5 bucks for what has been free, and turning over admin to some faceless corporation that's *very* likely to be less responsive than what I've been used to.

  8. in other news... by Malachite · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...the number of stupid webpages sporting american flags and those silly "osama bin laden: wanted dead or alive" posters is expected to skyrocket.

  9. Scrap .com, all use contry codes. by Mike+McTernan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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."

    It's always annoyed me how the world seems to use country codes for it's TLD's, and then the US has some other TLDs that is just uses.

    For example, when shopping online I want to know if a company will ship to the UK. If it is a .co.uk company I can be sure it will. If it is a .com, it might or might not.

    Essentially it seems logical for organisations to just register the TLDs for the countries in which they operate/are registered, and for the .com TLD to be scrapped (Although this would never happen).

    Oh, I'd scrap .edu too. .ac.us would be a fine replacement.

    --
    -- Mike
  10. Re:only us residents by rfc1394 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Again a ccTLD which is only of use for residents of this country.
    As the actual owner of a .US domain for more than two years now, that's not my understanding, I believe that .US has always been open to anyone who wants to register a compliant address. (Compliant means it has to be under a 2-character state and a specific city in that state). In fact, you don't even have to be where the domain is named; for example, my domain is listed as Washington, DC, but I do not live there (I live about 5 miles from Washington in another state). When I filled out the application with the nic for .US, which then was ISI at the University of Southern California (USC-ISI), I put down my address in Virginia and was issued the domain name the next day.
    That's not fair - why is my country then giving away it's domain to people all around the world?
    Doubtful that there are very many people outside of the US would want to bother with a .US address. I only got it because they're free, and basically about the only ones getting them are organizations tied to a specific city and state (local governments) and people or companies who are (to put it bluntly), cheapskates like me. The price of "free" was a lot more affordable for me when I wasn't working, as opposed to the (then exorbitant) $35 a year for a .COM or other TLD address.
    In my opinion this should be standarized. So that all ccTLDs are open for everybody.
    A country code TLD is subject to whatever rules that the country code agency of that country decides. You can't get a ham radio license in a particular country unless you follow its rules and there's no reason that whomever runs a particular TLD can't set rules on who can apply or what they can get.

    Since most countries are charging for domains in their TLD the domain operator usually sees it as a profit center, and with the exception of the few remaining communist countries - and maybe some of them, too - I suspect you can get a registration in just about any country's tld whether or not you live there.

    Paul Robinson <Postmaster@paul.washington.dc.us>

    --
    The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
  11. Re:The point of country TLD's by mpe · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.