Consumer Groups Decry 'Dot-US' Policies

JThaddeus writes: "The Washington Post reports that nonprofits are complaining about how NeuStar Inc. registered '.us' names on a first-come, first-served basis. 'While NeuStar did set aside some generic names, such as parks.us and kids.us, several nonprofit groups accused the company of making those decisions arbitrarily.' Some of these names have policy implications."

It's not the policy so much as the approach

[Anonymous Coward]

I have more than 30 domain names, all of the old dotcom, dotnet and dotorg style. While this business of a-new-TLD-a-month is getting old quickly, I wouldn't have minded buying a .us. As someone who does business here and as someone who'd like to show some patriotism, I thought a few .us domains would make great sense.

That is, until I found out that you had to "bid" for the names, paying a nonrefundable "bidding" fee up front, regardless of whether or not you "won" the "auction." I'm using the bid and auction terms loosely here, because even though that's how it was hyped to the public, it wasn't an auction at all. It was, as mentioned, more of a first-come, first-serve situation. Except in the case of generic names like business.us, there really wasn't any true bidding taking place.

What ticks me off is that NeuStar (and the registrars) conned everyone into believing that this was truly going to be an auction. The incessant spam I got from Dotster - who I've never used as a registrar, and never will thanks to their .us spamfest - kept hyping the "dot US auction" and even now their site says that the "auction" is over.

If people had known ahead of time that it was first-come, first-serve, nobody would have put up the bidding fees. The whole thing was basically a big scam to get people to spend money that they didn't need to spend, since paying the bidding fee didn't give you any benefit.

Fuck NeuStar and fuck Dotster.

Re:It's not the policy so much as the approach

[jhunsake]

The "auction" had nothing to do with NeuStar, that's the way Dotster does its preregistrations. You could have used any numerous other registrars to pre-register names at $15 a year. And they don't charge you unless successfully registered (neither does Dotster). With that in mind, I preregistered my names at every registrar I could find to improve my chances, and it worked out great. And I only payed $30 (2 years) for each name.

Of course, if you had actually read www.nic.us, you would have known all this.