The deal between Neustar and the DoC’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, is for three years with two one-year renewal options, so Neustar, which has managed .us since it was liberalized in 2001, could have control of the domain until 2012.
Neustar’s bid met our selection criteria and we are confident of its abilities to manage the .us domain space. NTIA takes seriously its responsibility to ensure the stability and security of the .us domain for the benefit of the nation’s internet community, said NTIA assistant secretary John Kneuer in a statement.
In August, two rival companies teamed up as Alliance Registry to challenge Neustar’s incumbency. They were Afilias, which operates several top-level domains including .info and .org, and Go Daddy, the market-leading domain name registrar.
Alliance Registry had claimed that .us has been suffering from neglect since Neustar took over, with poor sales and a virtually empty registry for the Congress-mandated child-friendly .kids.us domain.
Neustar responded that quality (meaning security and stability) were more important that quantity of domains sold, and NTIA evidently agreed.
Our View
As we said in August, it was always going to be an uphill struggle for Alliance Registry to unseat the incumbent Neustar, if only because no change in this case was inherently more stable than change.
Alliance would have had to convince Commerce’s civil servants and political appointees that they should authorize a registry transition – a potentially risky infrastructure migration that has only really been attempted at scale once, by Afilias – in the absence of any major transgressions or failures by Neustar in the last six years.
Naturally, any embarrassing failures would have reflected badly on said civil servants. For that reason, and several others, it was always going to be a tough sell.
