By Nick Patience
The US government has given the internet community one month to come up with ideas about how to develop the underused .us country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) following a public meeting in Washington DC on Tuesday. But in sharp contrast to the battles over the development of the generic domain name system, many of those at the meeting were actually calling on US government representatives to take the lead on .us. The US government was deliberately excluded, at its own request, from the battles that resulted in the formation of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) last year. Many of those present Tuesday were veterans of those battles.
Other countries generally view their respective ccTLD as their principal domain name space. The US, on the other hand, quickly adopted the generic TLDs, such as .com, .net and .org, more or less as its own, leaving the .us name space as the preserve mainly of local, state and federal governments, although there is no restriction on anybody getting a name in .us – just a perception that it’s only for governmental bodies.
As a result of this shunning, .us has just 10,450 unique names registered in its zone. In comparison, there are about 3.5 million names registered in .com, .net and .org at present. Administration of the .us domain is in the hands of the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California, whose former director, Jon Postel established the geographical hierarchy on which .us is based. Names are registered in an entity-locality-state format laid out by Postel and ISI’s Ann Cooper in June 1993. Thus ComputerWire in New York City would be computerwire.nyc.ny.us, whereas in San Francisco it would be computerwire.sf.ca.us. There are also other branches that prefix the state code dedicated to schools (k12), libraries (lib) and community colleges (cc) as well as a special fed.us branches for federal government agencies.
This works well for entities that need to be identified by their physical locations, such as firehouses or schools, but not so well for large companies that operate across all 50 states, as well as internationally. It also has privacy and practical implications for individuals who move around a lot and may not want a domain that identifies their physical address so accurately. It became clear during the meeting, which was attended by about 50 people in all, that reform of the geographic hierarchy will be necessary if the domain is going to flourish, but it should not be thrown out altogether because it has its uses. It’s not either/or, said Woody Torrence of Bell Atlantic, a view that was echoed by many around the table, including Brian Kahin of the Commerce Department’s Office of Science and Technology policy, who chaired part of the discussion.
So the possibility exists of splitting off part of the name space for commercial use, while retaining the geographical part for those who want it. Some at the meeting who have been registering names in .us for some years could not see the value in such a proposal, but it appears the consensus view was to establish a separate, parallel commercial space within .us. It could take the form of .com.us and so on, as is the case with Australia’s ccTLD, .au. If such parallel development can be achieved, the geographical constrictions of .us could then start to work in its favor, because by limiting it to US-based companies, any trademark disputes could be heard under US law – there is no such thing as international trademark law as each body of trademark law is country-specific. At present, registrants in .us need not be resident in the US and companies don’t need to have a business in the state for which they register. That may or may not change if a commercial zone of .us is established, so long as registrants agree that any disputes should be heard under US law. It should be noted that many countries do not require residency for registrations in their ccTLDs.
Last August, the DOC solicited comments
from the public about what to do with .us and Tuesday’s meeting was a follow-up to that. Of the 800 or so comments received, apparently about 80% of them were reactions to a proposal submitted to the government but the US Postal Service (USPS) – with 70% of those in favor and 30% opposed. The USPS proposed taking over the operation completely and mapping it to physical addresses in the US. The USPS’ Leo Campbell reiterated the proposal at the meeting, which was less aggressively stated than it has been in the past and which includes an element of US government oversight. There was not much agreement in the room with the view that the USPS should take over at this point, although Network Solutions Inc’s attorney Phil Sbarro did voice support for such a move, saying the USPS could have the systems up and running within six months – it could work so long as .us finds its own niche, he said.
The meeting heard three other possible models for overhauling .us. Robert Hall of the Canadian .ca registry explained how that country is in the process of overhauling its operations and opting for a private sector-based approach which requires that a registrant have at least an agent representing them in Canada, if not residency themselves. A proposal from Anthony Van Couvering, most recently of NetNames, and Alan Sullivan of domainregsirty.net, which was drawn up in October 1997 was reviewed at the meeting. It proposed creating affinity second- level domains in order to make .us more popular and commercial- friendly. Van Couvering and Sullivan had suggested some placeholder names back in 1997, such as news.us and isp.us, but now said they should be replaced and called for the development of more meaningful second-level names. We need to identify areas where people gather together, Van Couvering said, and adopt names that reflect them, without being too rigid. Another proposal came from Kathy Kleiman of the Domain Name Rights Coalition, who called for the Federal Communications Commission to take over the running of .us, as it used to dealing with public hearings and protecting the public interest, understands communications, and can handle appeals, among other attributes. We need the government to protect not only the people we have now but all the people in the future, she said.
Kahin called on those present to form themselves into some sort of group and come up with workable models for running .us which, incidentally, costs ISI about $10,000 a year to run and which is still funded by NSI through its cooperative agreement, according to ISI’s Zita Wenzel. Kahin did not feel the RFC process pushed us in any clear direction. He asked for suggestions on how to manage second-level domains – the idea of affinity group identifiers. Van Couvering told Kahin that any group will need some sort of structure from the government or at least the times and places of meetings set, noting that the last time the government asked to do this, the internet community split into different factions. The government will take comments on the subject until April 9. Kahin noted that with so few domains registered at present there are not a lot of stakeholders and they are not very entrenched. Managed properly, reform of .us, which has been a stepchild kept in the closet, as one attendee put it, should be a cakewalk compared to the wider DNS struggles that have raged over the past few years.
