With all the arm-wrestling over top-level domain congestion, a novel idea is circulating: injecting a little national pride in the system by promoting America's underused and underappreciated domain, .us.
Most industrialized countries rely heavily on their national domains - Canada (.ca), Japan (.jp), and the Netherlands (.nl) have among the most-used domains in the world. And about 65 Net-savvy countries like Tonga (.to) and the United Kingdom (.uk) are cashing in on their domains by selling addresses to anyone in the world, regardless of nationality. But Americans, who have developed an attachment to the generic .com, .org, and .net, have yet to embrace .us - even though it's cheaper to register a name in that space.
"A lot of people just don't know it exists, and then there's the length of the addresses - people don't like it," said Jon Postel of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which, through an agreement with the National Science Foundation, runs the .us domain on a nonprofit basis. Postel is also director of the computer network division of the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California.
To be sure, www.homepage.com is a lot easier to remember, and type, than www.homepage.seattle.wa.us. And that's how .us names are handled - every address includes one of 8,000 city names, a state code, and the .us domain. The active and consistent users of .us are primary and secondary schools. For K-12 schools in the United States, domains are not the elegant www.yourschool.edu but rather www.yourschool.k12.tulsa.ok.us. But wait, if the school is private, the domain would be www.yourschool.pvt.K12.tulsa.ok.us.
Complicated enough? There's more: Unlike the system for registering domain names as .com, .net, .org, .edu, and .gov, currently run by Network Solutions, there is no central registry for .us. Instead, USC's Information Sciences Institute delegates registration and maintenance of .us domain names to about 1,000 Internet service providers and individuals. To sign up, you must email us-domain@isi.edu for information on registrars.
Despite the complications, .us has its benefits. First, a .us domain name is cheaper than names in the generic spaces administered by Network Solutions - the cost runs between $10 to $20 a year depending on individual registrars, compared to Network Solutions' $100 sign-up charge and (starting in the third year) $50 per annum maintenance fee. Since the domain is so little used, many names already taken in the .com space are still available for .us addresses. And, for some companies and individuals, addresses that include the .us geographical locators could be appealing.
But Postel's proposal is just one of several that will alter the relatively uncomplicated reality of .us. And some involved in the rancorous international debate over domain names say they see a for-profit agenda behind Postel's .us campaign.
Postel concedes that higher registration fees for .us names could be on the way as the Information Sciences Institute begins charging individual registrars for signing up new domains. The institute is talking about a $30 or $40 fee that would almost certainly be passed on to consumers.
Postel insists that the ISI system will remain nonprofit. But some aren't so sure.
"The .us issue is a very interesting twist on the battle over control of domain names," says Andy Sernovitz, president of the Association for Interactive Media, a group of about 300 companies and organizations, including IBM, Nynex, AT&T, US West, and CNET, that wants a say in how the domain-name system is run. "I would not be surprised if they [ISI] start trying to go into for-profit registration of .us."
Like all things American, all it may take is a good marketing campaign for .us to become the next really big thing on the Net.
"It might not have the cachet of .com now, but technically it functions just the same," says Christopher Clough, spokesman for Network Solutions.
