.us

On February 15, 1985, us was created as the Internet's first ccTLD. Its original administrator was Jon Postel of the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California (USC). He administered us under a subcontract that the ISI and USC had from SRI International (which held the us and the gTLD contract with the United States Department of Defense) and later Network Solutions (which held the us and the gTLD contract with the National Science Foundation). Postel and his colleague Ann Westine Cooper codified the us ccTLD's policies in December 1992 as RFC 1386 and revised them the following June in RFC 1480. Registrants could only register third-level domains or higher in a geographic and organizational hierarchy. From June 1993 to June 1997, Postel delegated the vast majority of the geographic subdomains under us to various public and private entities. us registrants could register with the delegated manager for the specific zone they wished to register in, but not directly with the us administrator. In July 1997, Postel instituted a "50/500 rule" that limited each delegated manager to 500 localities maximum, 50 in a given state. Postel died that month, leaving his domain administration responsibilities with ISI. In December 2000, these responsibilities were transferred to Network Solutions, which had recently been acquired by Verisign. On October 26, 2001, Neustar was awarded the contract to administer us. On April 24, 2002, second-level domains under us became available for registration. One of the first us domain hacks, icio.us, was registered on May 3, 2002, for the creation of the subdomain del.icio.us. A moratorium was placed on additional delegations of locality-based namespaces, and Neustar became the default delegate for undelegated localities. Neustar's contract was renewed by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) in 2007, 2014, and most recently in 2019 for a term of 10 years. On March 31, 2019, the us registry made it clear that under its Acceptable Use Policy it would not allow the sale of opioids through the us top level domain. In Q2 2020, GoDaddy acquired Neustar's registry business. == Locality namespace ==

The us ccTLD is historically organized under a complex locality namespace hierarchy. Until second-level registrations were introduced in 2002, us permitted only fourth-level domain registrations of the form ...us, with some exceptions for government entities. Registrants of locality-based domains must meet the same criteria as in the rest of the us ccTLD. Though the locality namespace is most commonly used for government entities, it is also open to registrations by private businesses and individuals. Since 2002, second-level domain registrations have eclipsed those in the locality namespace, and many local governments have transitioned to .org and other TLDs. According to a 2013 survey of 539 delegated managers, 282 were state or local government agencies, while 98 were private individuals and 85 were commercial Internet service providers. Nearly 90% of the respondents offer domain registrations for free. • Example: (formerly the United States Forest Service) • isa.us for interstate authorities created by interstate compacts • Example: (Interstate Mining Compact Commission) • nsn.us for Native Sovereign Nations (which may also use -nsn.gov) • Example: (Mohegan Tribe) • dni.us for distributed national institutes • Example: (formerly the Conference of Chief Justices, part of the National Center for State Courts) Locality domains A large number of third-level domains are reserved for localities within states. Each fourth-level domain registration under this namespace follows the format ...us, where is a state's two-letter postal abbreviation and is a hyphenated name that corresponds to a ZIP code or appears in a well-known atlas. Two values of are formally reserved across the entire locality namespace for city and county governments: • (the neighborhood association for Hope, Providence, Rhode Island) • (a Mastodon instance in Seattle) • (a Mastodon instance in Tulsa, Oklahoma) • (a Linux user group in Chicago) • (The WELL, a virtual community in San Francisco) The us TLD registrar serves as the default delegated manager for all undelegated third-level locality domains, as well as any locality domains relinquished by delegated managers. Under Neustar and GoDaddy, the registrar has discontinued delegation of third-level locality domains, as well as registration of domain names under any locality or affinity domain for which it serves as the delegated manager. Alternative locality names Some delegated managers alternatively register domains under common abbreviations of locality names, which are not necessarily interchangeable, for example: Affinity namespaces Directly beneath the .us zone, several affinity namespaces are reserved for specific purposes: • state: state government agencies (.state..us) • Examples: (Arkansas General Assembly), (Michigan Department of Health and Human Services immunization records portal), (New Mexico Taxation and Revenue Department tax filing system) • dst: government agencies in administrative districts (.dst..us) • Example: (Lower Neches Valley Authority) • cog: councils of governments, that is, federations of cities or counties (.cog..us) • Example: (South Texas Development Council) • k12: public elementary and/or secondary unified school districts (.k12..us) individual schools (.k12..us). Also used by public agencies overseeing educational institutions. • Examples: (Iberia Parish School District), (Pioneer Career and Technology Center), (Washington State Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction) • pvt.k12: private elementary or secondary schools (.pvt.k12..us or ..pvt.k12..us) • Examples: (Iona Preparatory School), (a private K-12 school in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Cleveland in Ohio) • The k12.ma.us delegate manager additionally delegates domains under chtr.k12.ma.us and paroch.k12.ma.us for charter schools and parochial schools, respectively. • cc: community colleges (.cc..us) • Example: (Lake Land College) • tec: technical and vocational schools (.tec..us) • Example: (Admiral Peary Vocational-Technical School) • lib: public libraries (.lib..us) • Example: (Monroe County District Library) • mus: museums (.mus..us) • Example: (Oklahoma Historical Society) • gen: general independent entities (clubs or other groups not fitting into the above categories) (.gen..us) • Examples: (a amateur radio association in Minnesota), (a Linux user group for northern Illinois), (a statewide federation of square dance clubs) Some of these affinity namespaces have been supplanted by more convenient sponsored top-level domains. The first sTLD, .museum, became available in October 2001 as an alternative to the .mus namespace. Since April 2003, the .edu top-level domain has been available as an alternative for community colleges, technical and vocational schools, and other tertiary educational institutions that might have previously used the .cc or .tec affinity namespaces. Although the Kentucky Department of Education operates the .k12.ky.us namespace for Kentucky school districts, most districts instead use subdomains of the less formal domain kyschools.us, which the department operates in a similar manner. For example, Gallatin county schools have a website at , while Paducah Public Schools are located at and the McCracken County Public Schools use as a redirect to . ==Kids.us==

The Dot Kids Implementation and Efficiency Act of 2002 () established a .kids.us second-level domain. The general public could register third-level domains under .kids.us for educational content that met strict requirements, including conformance to the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act and adherence to Children's Advertising Review Unit standards. Webpages were prohibited from linking outside the .kids.us namespace. On July 27, 2012, in response to declining usage and a petition by Neustar the previous year, the NTIA suspended .kids.us registrations. By that time, 651 domains were registered under .kids.us, and only five registrants (Nickelodeon, Nick Jr., PBS Kids, the Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies, and Super-Fun Sports Inc., operating trampoline.kids.us and trampolines.kids.us) were operating active websites. == Restrictions on use ==

Under us nexus requirements, us domains may be registered only by the following qualified entities: • Any United States citizen or resident, • Any United States entity, such as organizations or corporations, • Any foreign entity or organization with a bona fide presence in the United States To ensure that these requirements are met, GoDaddy frequently conducts "spot checks" on registrant information. To prevent anonymous registrations that do not meet these requirements, in 2005 the National Telecommunications and Information Administration ruled that registrants of us domains may not secure private domain name registration via anonymizing proxies, and that their contact information must be made public. Registrants are required to provide complete contact information without omissions. Under the locality namespace, delegated managers may impose additional requirements. == Other top-level domains related to the United States ==

Some sponsored top-level domains (sTLDs) are restricted to U.S.-based entities, other than some grandfathered registrations. These domains are much more popular than the equivalent domains under us. Territories of the United States use their own country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). Identical domains are reserved under us but in practice go unused. Some U.S. cities are the focus of generic top-level domains under the New gTLD Program. These gTLDs are not necessarily affiliated with the delegated managers of the corresponding third-level domains within the us locality namespace. Unofficially, some ccTLDs belonging to other countries are used by U.S.-based private organizations and state government agencies based on their similarity to postal state abbreviations or informal city name abbreviations. == See also ==