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Small Business Administration Objects to .US Deal
rlarner writes: "The United States Small Business Administration has written a letter to the NTIA that challenges the .US sale. The SBA claims that the UDRP and sunrise period were not properly enacted - they needed comment periods, etc. The letter is here." We've done a few previous stories about the handling of .us. Free registration of second-level domains under .us were supposed to go live shortly.
What sort of policies do we want for .us domains?
.gov and .mil addresses should be changed to .gov.us and .mil.us addresses.
.co.us domain to have one more generic level in the domain, such as cnn.news.co.us? That would cut down on the problems of namespace collisions.
I would like to see them become widely used, but I would also like to see some degree of hierarchical naming enforced.
I think all
There should probably be a small set of foo.us domains pre-defined for which people could register bar.foo.us domains.
mybiz.com.us (US business)
myname.indv.us (individual)
mybiz.com.ma.us (Massachussetts local business)
Or should we require any
With Trademark law trumping (virtuall) all name issues on the internet, adding a new TLD for use anywhere is simply useless.
...well that is, of course, unless it's a personal domain...and only then if your name doesn't conflict with some trademark somewhere.
Where do you live, North Dakota?
Do you have any idea how many "Jim Smith" or "Bob Jones" there are in New York or California? Including middle names doesn't eliminate the name collisions, but makes the system much less useful since most people don't routinely use their middle names and acquaintances are unlikely to know them.
Even in Iowa you'll see a lot of collisions.
A while back a friend and I did web searches for our "friends." We all have relatively uncommon names, both family and given. Yet all of us had "twins" listed on the net, sometimes "twins" near our own age and in our own profession. Some of us had multiple hits - back in 1995 a coworker found 4 other men with the same name. Today the same search would probably yield a dozen or more matches.
This search was at the national level, not state level, but that's arguably a moot point since our population is so mobile that it's common for people to live in several states during their lifetime.
Taking a step back from the problem, a few years ago comp.risks mentioned an Australian plan (population 20 million) to uniquely identify citizens by full name and date of birth. They discovered that THREE women had the same name and birthday after the state detected "fraud" in the student loan program - the same "person" was simultaneously enrolled in college and earning a paycheck 1000 km away. (I don't remember what the third woman was doing.)
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Um, I think AlterNIC has had .xxx for years. So their users (and users of hierarchies who peers with them, such as OpenNIC) are all ready to connect to your .xxx site.
You can whine about ICANN, or you can set up your machine(s) to take away their power and get what you want. Pretty easy decision, IMHO.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Are the old state.us domain heirarchys grandfathered
in or are they going to be arbitrarily taken back
and sold to the highest bidder?
Since state.us has existed for a long time it would seem rather dumb for the commerce department to yank the state's domain names away from them.
Are the two letter state abbreviations trademarked by the post office so noone else can use them?