
I just received a fishy call from a guy a usdns.org. Bottom line is they want to bill for .US domain registrations and give us a kickback for the .US subdomains that we host. What do any of you know about this group? -- Eric Kozowski VP Internet Services eric@structured.net Structured Network Systems, Inc. (800)390-5945 Support A Verio Affiliate (800)881-0962 Sales/Info http://www.structured.net/ PGP Key fingerprint = 0A E4 91 B8 BD CB 3E 95 42 12 04 4E 14 DF 86 76 'They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.' -- Benjamin Franklin 1759

Eric Kozowski spake hither: : : : I just received a fishy call from a guy a usdns.org. Bottom line is they want : to bill for .US domain registrations and give us a kickback for the .US : subdomains that we host. : : What do any of you know about this group? : Looks like people who try to "organize" .us domains, like so: This is site is password protected. The Name Consortium, Inc. is a Service Bureau for US Domain Registrars, and is not affiliated with the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern If you are a US Domain Registrar, and you do not have a password, email service@usdns.org and let us know!

On Wed, 11 Jun 1997, Eric Kozowski wrote: ==>I just received a fishy call from a guy a usdns.org. Bottom line is they want ==>to bill for .US domain registrations and give us a kickback for the .US ==>subdomains that we host. ==> ==>What do any of you know about this group? Well, since the two organizations are completely different (.us TLD is hosted by IANA/ISI), I'd say tell them to stuff it and cc: us-domain@isi.edu. chuegen@chuegen-sun:7:~>whois us-dom | more United States of America top-level domain (US-DOM) Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) c/o University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute 4676 Admiralty Way Marina del Rey, CA 90292 Domain Name: US Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact: United States Domain Registrar (USDR) us-domain@ISI.EDU (310) 822-1511 [~~~] chuegen@chuegen-sun:8:~>whois usdns.org [rs.internic.net] Name Consortium, Inc. (USDNS3-DOM) 417 E. Sheridan St. Suite 127 Dania, FL 33004 US Domain Name: USDNS.ORG Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact: Brownley, Oprah Basil (OBB2) oprah@USDNS.COM 954 922-1899 (FAX) 954 922-1652 [~~~] /cah

On Wed, Jun 11, 1997 at 12:31:50PM -0700, Eric Kozowski wrote:
I just received a fishy call from a guy a usdns.org. Bottom line is they want to bill for .US domain registrations and give us a kickback for the .US subdomains that we host.
What do any of you know about this group?
-- Eric Kozowski VP Internet Services eric@structured.net Structured Network Systems, Inc. (800)390-5945 Support A Verio Affiliate (800)881-0962 Sales/Info http://www.structured.net/ PGP Key fingerprint = 0A E4 91 B8 BD CB 3E 95 42 12 04 4E 14 DF 86 76 'They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.' -- Benjamin Franklin 1759
That figures. There be lots of scamming going on in .US, and the IANA is responsible for all of it. They have handed out hundreds of registries to companies which aren't even remotely in the same geographic area as the part of the TLD being served. One of our customers (the City of Aurora) was badly screwed by the holder of the delegation for that area; frankly, if anyone deserves to be able to manage that delegation, its the organization to which the delegation would refer! I don't know where Mr. Postel gets his cajones, but they're big and brass when it comes to this stuff. -- -- Karl Denninger (karl@MCS.Net)| MCSNet - The Finest Internet Connectivity http://www.mcs.net/~karl | T1's from $600 monthly to FULL DS-3 Service | 99 Analog numbers, 77 ISDN, http://www.mcs.net/ Voice: [+1 312 803-MCS1 x219]| NOW Serving 56kbps DIGITAL on our analog lines! Fax: [+1 312 803-4929] | 2 FULL DS-3 Internet links; 400Mbps B/W Internal

Comeon folks we have had this "conversation" on 10 different lists and I think the nanog folks would appreciate it *NOT* happening here. -Rick =================================================================== Rick H. Wesson Internet Business Services rick@ar.com

a peek at their web page indicates they are *not* related to ISI. i am not aware of anything that would give them the right to charge for .us registration. sounds like a big scam to me. On Wed, 11 Jun 1997, Eric Kozowski wrote:
I just received a fishy call from a guy a usdns.org. Bottom line is they want to bill for .US domain registrations and give us a kickback for the .US subdomains that we host.
What do any of you know about this group?
-- Eric Kozowski VP Internet Services eric@structured.net Structured Network Systems, Inc. (800)390-5945 Support A Verio Affiliate (800)881-0962 Sales/Info http://www.structured.net/ PGP Key fingerprint = 0A E4 91 B8 BD CB 3E 95 42 12 04 4E 14 DF 86 76 'They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.' -- Benjamin Franklin 1759

Date: Wed, 11 Jun 1997 16:47:25 -0400 (EDT) From: Ben Black <black@zen.cypher.net> Subject: Re: usdns.org To: Eric Kozowski <kozowski@structured.net> Cc: nanog@merit.edu
a peek at their web page indicates they are *not* related to ISI. i am not aware of anything that would give them the right to charge for .us registration. sounds like a big scam to me.
Aw, come on! There are a half dozen folk that have snarfed up cities in most states that have no relationship with the state. They charge the usual $50 per year for registering a domain in your own city!!! I an very unhappy that ISI has allowed that to happen!
On Wed, 11 Jun 1997, Eric Kozowski wrote:
I just received a fishy call from a guy a usdns.org. Bottom line is they want to bill for .US domain registrations and give us a kickback for the .US subdomains that we host.
What do any of you know about this group?
-- Eric Kozowski VP Internet Services eric@structured.net Structured Network Systems, Inc. (800)390-5945 Support A Verio Affiliate (800)881-0962 Sales/Info http://www.structured.net/ PGP Key fingerprint = 0A E4 91 B8 BD CB 3E 95 42 12 04 4E 14 DF 86 76 'They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.' -- Benjamin Franklin 1759
Dave Nordlund d-nordlund@ukans.edu University of Kansas 913/864-0450 Computing Services FAX 913/864-0485 Lawrence, KS 66045 KANREN

I haven't received anything from them lately, but I am the registrar for bolton.ma.us, my town. I don't have any intention of charging anyone anything for delegations (provided they are indeed in the town), but these folks are trying to sell delegations from the US domain. So far, they've effectively registered themselves with the US domain registrar for all town names in the USA which were not already covered by others, and are charging for the right to have a delegation below a town name. If they come to me looking to sub-delegate, my fee for them to pay me will be something like $150 plus time and expenses. For town folks, its free. I sent a note to ISI indicating my displeasure with the whole thing. I was a little surprised that ISI let them register thousands of domains. At 12:31 PM 6/11/97 -0700, Eric Kozowski wrote:
I just received a fishy call from a guy a usdns.org. Bottom line is they
want
to bill for .US domain registrations and give us a kickback for the .US subdomains that we host.
What do any of you know about this group?
-- Eric Kozowski VP Internet Services eric@structured.net Structured Network Systems, Inc. (800)390-5945 Support A Verio Affiliate (800)881-0962 Sales/Info http://www.structured.net/ PGP Key fingerprint = 0A E4 91 B8 BD CB 3E 95 42 12 04 4E 14 DF 86 76 'They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.' -- Benjamin Franklin 1759
Daniel Senie mailto:dts@openroute.com Sr. Staff Engineer http://www.openroute.com/ OpenROUTE Networks, Inc. (a wholly owned subsidiary of Proteon, Inc.)

Any word on whether Postel or the IANA is making anything off of the commercial registrars actions? -Deepak. On Wed, 11 Jun 1997, Daniel Senie wrote:
I haven't received anything from them lately, but I am the registrar for bolton.ma.us, my town. I don't have any intention of charging anyone anything for delegations (provided they are indeed in the town), but these folks are trying to sell delegations from the US domain. So far, they've effectively registered themselves with the US domain registrar for all town names in the USA which were not already covered by others, and are charging for the right to have a delegation below a town name.
If they come to me looking to sub-delegate, my fee for them to pay me will be something like $150 plus time and expenses. For town folks, its free. I sent a note to ISI indicating my displeasure with the whole thing. I was a little surprised that ISI let them register thousands of domains.
At 12:31 PM 6/11/97 -0700, Eric Kozowski wrote:
I just received a fishy call from a guy a usdns.org. Bottom line is they
want
to bill for .US domain registrations and give us a kickback for the .US subdomains that we host.
What do any of you know about this group?
-- Eric Kozowski VP Internet Services eric@structured.net Structured Network Systems, Inc. (800)390-5945 Support A Verio Affiliate (800)881-0962 Sales/Info http://www.structured.net/ PGP Key fingerprint = 0A E4 91 B8 BD CB 3E 95 42 12 04 4E 14 DF 86 76 'They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.' -- Benjamin Franklin 1759
Daniel Senie mailto:dts@openroute.com Sr. Staff Engineer http://www.openroute.com/ OpenROUTE Networks, Inc. (a wholly owned subsidiary of Proteon, Inc.)

Any word on whether Postel or the IANA is making anything off of the commercial registrars actions?
The .US domain is indeed badly screwed up, largely due to well-intentioned moves by IANA and ISI. The worst problem is the mandatory city.state.us structure, but that's a different problem from the one here. Several years ago they decided, not unreasonably, that handling all those registrations for .US was more work than they wanted to do for free, so they started delegating by city to volunteer registrars. For a while this worked just fine, as individuals, schools, and local businesses took over the delegations for their localities. Nobody charged anything to anyone. Around the time that NSI started charging for .COM et al. (I don't have the exact chronology worked out) ISI stated that the .US subregistrars could charge a nominal fee to defray their expenses. About a year ago several little companies all got the same idea and started asking for delegations for every locality in sight, all the large ones as well as tiny ones with cool names, e.g., surf-city.nj.us, so they could make big bucks charging people for local names as well as vanity names. (Hey, D00D, wanna be beachboy@surf-city.nj.us ?) Once I saw what was happening, I grabbed all the available towns, villages, and counties around here to save them from the greedsters, as I gather have many other people, but the damage is now done with hundreds of places in the hands of the speculators. The registries for a couple of towns where I had names registered got scooped up before I had a chance to get them myself, and for the past year I've been getting $10 "renewal" invoices for my old names, all of which I've ignored, and all of my old names still work. The demand for geographic names seems to be as low as it ever was, so none of the little companies is taking in much revenue and they provide rotten service. My suggestion to ISI at this point would be to distinguish between "community" registrars and "commercial" registrars. A community registrar must have a reasonable relation to the place for which it's a registry, e.g. live or have an office within 20 miles of it, and handle registrations at no charge. Commercial registries have no such restrictions. In case of conflicting requests between community and commercial registrars, the community registrar wins. -- John R. Levine, IECC, POB 640 Trumansburg NY 14886 +1 607 387 6869 johnl@iecc.com, Village Trustee and Sewer Commissioner, http://iecc.com/johnl, Finger for PGP key, f'print = 3A 5B D0 3F D9 A0 6A A4 2D AC 1E 9E A6 36 A3 47
participants (10)
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Ben Black
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Craig A. Huegen
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Daniel Senie
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DAVE NORDLUND
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Deepak Jain
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Eric Kozowski
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johnl@trumansburg.ny.us
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Jonathan Bobin
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Karl Denninger
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Rick H. Wesson