[NA-Discuss] history of .US, was Fwd: Edits and comments

[John R. Levine]

> 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