The competitive bidding process came about when the federal government decided to release the .us domain for wider use. When VeriSign administered the .us domain, the company essentially restricted it for government use.
Now that anybody can submit a reservation for a .us domain, state and local governments need to protect their domain name. Somebody else can't buy the name overnight, though, because the U.S. Department of Commerce and NeuStar reserved a large block of .us domain names for federal, state and local government agencies several months ago.
Preserving the History
"When the Department of Commerce assigned the contract to us to run the .us database, they asked that we preserve the historical naming space and that we open the space," said Mike Kennedy, director of business development of NeuStar. "In addition to having state.ca.us, California could also get california.us, because people have become very used to short, memorable names to navigate the Internet.
"A naming convention like state.ca.us doesn't necessarily resonate with the mass market or the majority of U.S. citizens," Kennedy said. "However, California.us does. We are maintaining the legacy space because it is widely used, but we're making these other names available as optional names to state and local governments if they choose to use them."
State and local government entities have a little more time -- they must register their .us domain names by Jan. 30, 2003. As with federal agencies, all state and local government reserved names that are not registered by the deadline will be returned to the publicly available pool of .us names.
Get 'Em While You Can
The new naming categories adopted by NeuStar are based on information from the 2002 Census file. Kennedy said a city should secure the rights to at least twodifferent .us domain names (for a breakdown of the new naming conventions, please visit NeuStar's list of name categories).
"For most cities, it's really just like two options," he said. "If Sacramento is classified as a city, it would be sacramentocity.us or cityofsacramento.us -- more often than not, it's really two names that are a city's option."
If Sacramento officials decided not to buy the other two .us names that could apply to the city -- "townofsacramento.us" or "sacramentotown.us" -- unsavory Web site operators could snap up those names and then create whatever type of Web site they want at that address.
"A city has three options: one would be to do nothing with the names that are available; second, a city could get a permanent reservation for domain names, which keeps those names locked in the database so that nobody from the general public gets them; or they can pay as much as $395 to get that domain name and never have to worry about renewing that name for the rest of the name's life," Kennedy said.
The company has set up several pricing options for registering a state or local government .us domain name: a lifetime registration is $395; a five-year registration, $180; a three-year registration, $168; and for $152, a state or local government can permanently reserve its domain name.
Resolving the Differences
If a state, city or county has committed to a .gov or .net Web presence, and doesn't want to move to the .us domain, Kennedy recommends reserving the appropriate .us name anyway and resolving it to the already existing .gov or .net domain name.
Though a permanent reservation will secure a particular .us name for life, the subsequent activation of that domain name will require a payment for a full lifetime registration, Kennedy said.
The pricing and reservation options reflect input gathered from government groups such as the National Association of State Chief Information Officers, the National Association of Counties, the National League of Cities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Kennedy said.
"What we kept hearing from these groups was, 'We have so many constituents of ours that have bought a domain name, used it, and then one thing led to another, and the person who was responsible for actually renewing the domain name, when the renewal came up, either retired, moved on into another job in the government or left altogether, and [our constituents] never got the renewal notice. And all of a sudden, the name came up, was available and somebody else got the name and whatever Web presence [our constituents] had with that name is gone,'" he said.
