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.

Comments

What do we want for .us?

[crow]

What sort of policies do we want for .us domains?

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 .gov and .mil addresses should be changed to .gov.us and .mil.us addresses.

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 .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.

Re:What do we want for .us?

[Matey-O]

If the rules are too strict, you're left with:

http://unemploymentBenefits.cdle.state.co.us

Try to give THAT to a reporter over the phone and not get it screwed up in the news clipping!

(www.coworkforce.com/uib works MUCH better)

TLDs are useless!!!

[erroneus]

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.

*boggle*

[coyote-san]

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.)