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.us Domains Coming in 2002
marnanel writes "Perhaps it had to happen eventually: the .us top-level domain has been transferred to a private company, NeuStar. One of the most interesting effects of this is that second-level domains, such as foo.us, will be available for the first time, instead of the existing hierarchical county.state.us system." But not until mid 2002.
It'd be nice to start a non-profit company, register .org.us, and let other non-profit organizations register domains on it really cheap.
Has anyone noticed that the .us TLD is now using (A|B|C).GTLD.BIZ for its root nameservers?
.BIZ, then you might not be able to resolve stuff in .US. Very interesting.
In other words, if you don't accept the ICANN version of
im still waiting for .asm so i can own http://www.org.asm. But as for .us i wonder how many people will get anti-american sites, www.taliban.says.fsck.you.us/ or www.bomb.the.us/. And what kind of action would be taken against the owner(s).
These domain names were just brain farts, i do not support acts of terrorism.
Carpe meam simiam!
Not only will the last orthodox free registrar be gone forever, but we'll have 20 million all.your.bases.belong.to.us variants.
Then again, because certain municipalities were delegated to various ISP's it wasn't necessarily free... in Richmond, VA i2020.net wanted $200 per year for mydomain.richmond.va.us. This was only after 6 hours on the phone, trying to convince various people there that they had it delegated to them...
Maybe I take these things too seriously, but it makes me sick just thinking about it.
Am I the only one who is enraged? Neustar sucks! Look at what they did with .BIZ - just a new hyped up domain so they can bring in loads of money for companies scrambling to protect their trade name.
.US domain has been used for years without problems. I don't see why the Dept of Commerce needed to hand this over to Neustar. Neustar is going to be charging and making ungodly sums of money.
.US domain owner, I am pissed off.
The
The United States is a LARGE, well-connected country. It is NOT practical to give 2nd-level domains (joeblow.us) out to the public. The system of org.locality.state.us is much more fair as there will be less disputes. Granted, companies and organizations that span more than one locality or state should be allowed to have lower-level (3rd or maybe 2nd) domains.
I emailed Neustar (that is the stupidest name of a company I have ever heard) last week about some of these issues I am concerned about, and never received a response.
As a
Anyone else remember when domain names were free and you never got spam on usenet or e-mail?
Anybody else remember when the Internet was strictly government run and only really big geeks could play on it and you only had 300 baud links and the practical uses of it were nonexistent?
Cry me a river...technology progresses. Deal with it. Stop living in the 70s.
It should have been this way right from the start. Every country should have its country code as its top level domain, and that should be subdivided as best convenient for that country. In the U.S., each state would be assigned a 2-letter name under .us, and that state would be responsible for subdividing further. A big state like California might subdivide further by counties.
It should never have been simply "something.com"--this may have actually helped lead to the .com mess of the past several years, which has screwed up the tech sector so badly. ("Hey! Here's a business idea! Better register that domain name NOW before someone gets it, write up some press releases, and we're millionaires!" It's all psychology. Make the system more organized and its users will have to be too.) From the very start, people would have gotten used to the fact that some company's domain name is something.county.state.us or something.city.state.us or whatever. (Subdividing by city actually makes more sense (to me) than by county, as your snailmail address includes your street address, city and state, not your county.)
Furthermore, .net, .com and .org should only have existed for international entities; .net being for network providers; .com for multinational commercial entities and .org for multinational nonprofit organizations. ONLY! These domains, and only these domains, would be regulated by some international mess of a bureaucracy. Their rules would include a minimum number of countries you have to do business in before getting a domain like that. For example, you must do so many millions worth of business in, say, 10 countries in order to get a .com.
When limited to the U.S., these entities would have to get a .com.state.us address, and the name must be the name of the business (or entity). Registered trademarks would get a .tm.us. Federal government sites would get a .gov.us. State governments would get a .gov.state.us. County and city governments would be further organized in a hierarchy.
In short, by using rules that make sense to KNOWLEDGEABLE computer folks, a very large mess wouldn't exist now. Huge technical problems would be reduced to nothing. Legal problems would nearly go away too--we wouldn't have people fighting over domain names and stupid stuff like that. (If there was a fight, it could only happen between people in the same city (or state in the worst case) and there would be no authority to handle it--all names are first-come-first-serve. (The protection is already in place, since you have to own the appropriate trademark or have the appropriately named business in order to have that domain name.) And if all else fails, one party could buy the name off the other, as was done in the past.)
The way the system is today causes another big HUGE chunk of bureaucracy that is totally unnecessary and costs a lot of money and headaches. OH WELL.
So I went though all the domains, and noticed that only z.com seems to be a functioning website (redirects to Nissan's website.)
I was the first to register Z.COM. IANA once gave a directive that said, "all one-letter names shall be reserved to enable name-hashing at a later time". Working for a company that registered domain names on a daily basis, I thought, "If X.ORG can have a domain name, why can't I register Z.COM?" To my surprise, it worked! The following month, IANA gobbled up all the rest of the one-letter names.
A few years later, I started having people knock on my door monthly saying they'd buy or trade my domain. They didn't see much of a value to it, and neither did I. While I was a bit altruistic, I did have a price in mind where I'd do away with my domain. One day this guy offered me 50% more than that price, so I took it. It went toward a down payment on a house that later made me some real money.
The guy tried to make a simple Z.COM web portal out of it. Their gimmick was that all one had to do was hit "z" on their web browser address, and poof, there you were at Z.COM. The portal never gained momentum.
Other people bought it from him and tried again to make a portal out of it, but their gimmick was to give "lifetime" e-mail accounts if they visited the portal regularly. Again, another Z.COM portal failed, and those "lifetime" addresses disappeared with it.
The next purchaser was apparently IDEAlab. They never did anything with it and with their financial demise probably thought they should sell/dump it for whatever they could.
Enter Nissan. My guess is that they might release or re-release a "Z" car in the future.
I mildly regret selling the name away. I thought the purchaser would have done something better with it. I could give Nissan a web redirect as good as anyone else.
--
Eric Z iegast
eric@z.com
uunet!z!eric