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The Internet Your Rights Online

Consumer Groups Decry 'Dot-US' Policies 16

Posted by timothy from the word-of-the-day-is-mercantile dept.
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."
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Consumer Groups Decry 'Dot-US' Policies More

Consumer Groups Decry 'Dot-US' Policies

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  • Implications of .us distribution (Score:3, Interesting)

    by lindsayt ( 210755 ) on Monday April 29, 2002 @01:54PM (#3430487)
    Despite all their statements, the .us distribution clearly favors big companies. The added bonus that the gov't has already claimed anything involving a municipality, state, county or region, makes it very difficult to get a good name. dot-us, which should have been a big deal for the US, has turned into a non-event. I was asked to bid on the .us version of my current domainname (thelindsays.org) about two months ago, and the name I'd really like, lindsay.us, was already taken more than a month before the public opening.

    No thanks, I'd rather have a non-obvious .com or .org than a non-obvious .us.
    • You're peeved that "thelindsays.org" couldn't be replaced with "thelindsays.us"? Whatever happened to Joe-server-in-a-closet getting "thelindsays.smalltown.state.us"? Is your family (or family business) so famous that it deserves to take national priority over all other potential lindsay family sites?
      Good grief!
      • No. I'm peeved that just because I own thelindsays.org I got a chance to buy thelindsays.us before the rest of the country, and that, simultaneously, the people who own lindsay.com, lindsay.net and lindsay.org were offered (and one took) lindsay.us before it was available to the rest of the people.

        I'm peeved that the system favors companies or groups that already own {name}.com|.org|.net to get the first crack at every new domain name, thus nullifying the entire reason for releasing new TLDs in the first place.

        Though I may have an over-inflated sense of importance sometimes, that does not enter into this specific equation. My concern is not that I think that I should have precedence, but rather that nobody should have precedence over anybody else.

        I'm not into flag-waving or patriotism; I saw .us as a possible chance to have more distribution of good domain names. Unfortunately, it's being sold merely as a way for current .com holders to make a flag-waving statement about how patriotic they are.

  • It's not the policy so much as the approach (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 29, 2002 @01:58PM (#3430530)
    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.
    • 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.

  • Dept Commerce Slipped Up (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 4of12 ( 97621 ) on Monday April 29, 2002 @02:53PM (#3431132) Homepage Journal

    It's too easy to err on the side of laissez faire on an issue that impacts the broader public like this.

    The Dept of Commerce should have set down a few more guidelines to head off some of the criticism.

    I think letting first claimants have priority, letting holders of related names have priority and people who pay money have priority are fine things, but not the only things.

    Having a probationary period where potential names are publicly posted before they become more permanent would be helpful.

    A Neustar website saying, for example, that an application for xenu.us was made tCoS on such and such a date for the amount of so many dollars and does anyone have a public comment on it would be helpful.

    Thereafter, forever hold thy peace.

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