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.

Re:The point of country TLD's

[Doomdark]

I was always under the impression that the country TLD's were meant to be used for sites that had geography-specific information

I don't know if that was the original intention, but it certainly hasn't been the practice. Outside of .us - domain (esp. before .com became 'hot') companies and universities did use country TLDs, many still do. Sometimes multi-national co's have localized sites (www.company.com for 'main page', www.company.fr for french version etc) using these too.

Re:Why does the US get its own Top Level domain?

[Phroggy]

In theory, com/net/org/edu/info/biz are generic TLDs not reserved for the US or any other country. There are .com registrar [joker.com]s in other countries. As far as I know, .gov and .mil are reserved for the US government and military, and .int is only for organizations established by international treaty.

Why does the US get its own Top Level Domain? We do; .us is it. It's a country code TLD just like .fr or .au, and each country is free to subdivide however they please.

Re:Changes We Are Seeing

[Jon_E]

i'm sorry - did you ever study your internet history? it was Verisign's ever since Verisign bought Network Solutions.

Network Solutions was awarded a government grant and had sole responsibility over all domains until the government got a clue as to what people were complaining about and started doing their job of regulation (something that should have been done around oh say '92) - under that contract Network Solutions (transferred to Verisign who bought out NSI) had responsibility for all those domains until the contract expired in '99 (including the .US domain), and managed to sweet-talk their way into keeping control over what became the big moneymakers. DoC never got on the ball to figure out what to do with the .US domain since everything else was a mess, and so it sat .. Verisign put in a bid, but didn't really care for the control of it and had been looking to unload it since they realized they had to manage it.

.US has been the bastard child TLD of the internet trying desparately to hold on to the idea of orderly conduct,