[NA-Discuss] history of .US, was Fwd: Edits and comments
John R. Levine
johnl at iecc.com
Fri Apr 1 02:32:12 UTC 2011
> Back in the late IANA management period I looked at who owned what and
> found that six people owned over half of the major US metro media markets.
Indeed. The problem is that the geographical registrars were about half
community registrars and half land grab. Most of the land grabbers
abandoned their domains when it turned out they weren't making big bucks
without telling anyone, so they only got reclaimed when someone
complained.
When it was clear that Neustar was coming, I grabbed a bunch of
municipalities north and west of where you now live, since someone else
already had ithaca.ny.us and tompkins.ny.us. I continue to operate them
and offer free registrations to the rare person who asks for them. I
agree that Neustar doesn't offer prospective registrants much help finding
me; you have to know to do a WHOIS lookup for <place>.xx.us.
I do have a few comunity sites, like www.ulysses.ny.us which is run by the
town. www.trumansburg.ny.us used to be the village, but for reasons
having more to do with personalities than technical merit they moved it to
trumansburg-ny.gov and I never found anyone willing to maintain the wiki I
put at the old name.
So, yeah, the .US domain was botched. Too bad. But if anyone wants a
watkins-glen.ny.us domain, just ask.
Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly
More information about the NA-Discuss
mailing list