.us Domains Coming in 2002 261
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.
.org.us (Score:1, Interesting)
US TLD linked at the hip to BIZ TLD (Score:2, Interesting)
In other words, if you don't accept the ICANN version of
.asm (Score:3, Interesting)
These domain names were just brain farts, i do not support acts of terrorism.
Wow. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
NEUSTAR CAN KISS MY (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:US TLD linked at the hip to BIZ TLD (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:And what this means is: (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
Re:US TLD linked at the hip to BIZ TLD (Score:1, Interesting)
From http://www.opennic.unrated.net/:
The OpenNIC membership overwhelmingly (80%) voted to not include ICANN's
I assume that means people using their root won't be able to descend into
BTW, I think the whole concept of "my root vs. your root" is flawed, and that the root should be totally up for grabs and let capitalism take effect. You know, define the "foo" TLD to be rooted in dom1.com and dom2.net, so when you go to http://www.foo, you're really going to http://www.foo.dom1.com/ or whatever. This could probably be done with some nsswitch magic, and leaves it up to the clients. Hooray!
Should've been from the start! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
I had "z" (Score:2, Interesting)
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