OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
Neustar held the .US domain names town hall last week. They mostly talked about how they do all these “great” marketing efforts they do and people on forums and blogs complained about that. But a few interesting things came out. BTW the Neustar marketing efforts are non-existent and everyone agrees on that as I have talked to a lot of people.
Neustar said that they are working on the whois privacy implementation for .us domain names. That was never allowed up to now, mainly because of the Nexus requirements. Only US residents and US organizations and companies that have a bona fide presence in the United States of America can own a .us domain name.
According to Neustar that has been their biggest policy issue to date. The Council formed subcommittees, solicited public comment and worked with law enforcement (?) and other stakeholders to build a consensus recommendation. It seems that .us whois privacy may be introduced in 2018.
Neustar is thinking of releasing premium 1 and 2 character domain names. The proposal was initiated by Neustar to “increase use and awreness of the .US brand” and of course for Neustar to make some money out of the auctions and renewal fees.
After the presentations there was some time for questions for the people attending the .US town hall. I asked why Neustar has limited the number of domain name whois queries to 20 per day per IP. My question was totally ignored and a lot of people noticed that and emailed me after the town hall. They ignored my question just like they have ignored my emails so far regarding this issue.
This is a serious problem and it becomes even more serious as Neustar is only permitting 20 whois queries across all the TLD they the the registry and/or the backend of like .biz, .nyc, .club, etc. That is more than 40 extensions so that equals to less than HALF a whois query per TLD per day! This is totally unacceptable and violates my rights as a registrant.
Here are some other interesting stats about the .US ccTLD extension:
- renewal rate for .us domain names is at about 80%
- 75% of all .us domain names are registered from people or companies from the United States
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.US is a true sleeping giant that should have and easily could have been as popular and prominent as you would normally expect it to be right from the start. That is especially so given the time in which it was released to the public for general use. “Sleeping giant” is not even a strong enough term, and “comatose” is more like it. It never had to be that way and doesn’t still.
You and I disagree on this aspect of the matter, Konstantinos, so we can amicably agree to disagree if you will, and I will simply say as I have said before that this normal popularity and adoption you would normally expect for .US would not even have required Neustar itself to even lift a finger working for it, although that has certainly always been desirable without question too. Rather, it is the red, white and blue “Uncle Sam” behind .US that has always had the ability and choice to act on this, just as Dorothy always had the ability to return home any time she wanted after all was said and done. Only this is not a great classic American fantasy tale but a great reality.
I have written extensively or at least substantially alluded previously as to why this has been the reality of the matter all these years since 2002, and am not in the mood to do so again right now. It’s also simply not pleasant to talk about sometimes. But one might well ask, if they always had the choice, then why didn’t they, and why don’t they, and doesn’t that not even make any sense? It’s not hard to see why at all.
>>”Neustar said that they are working on the whois privacy implementation for .us domain names. That was never allowed up to now, mainly because of the Nexus requirements. Only US residents and US organizations and companies that have a bona fide presence in the United States of America can own a .us domain name.
According to Neustar that has been their biggest policy issue to date.”
This is good news, however, as this has long been an option very much needed in this day and age, and without question its absence is a detriment to everything and everyone.
At least they don’t do registry takebacks like new gIRLS registries.
*gTLD
How could they do takebacks with .us domains? They DO takebacks with the gTLDs!