It took a long time, but here's the reply to my earlier message:
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 97 09:42:22 PDT From: US Domain Registration <usdomreg@ISI.EDU>
Bill:
To be clear, no you can't assume that you can register anywhere for free in the US domain. You don't have to deal with 3rd party services if you don't want to, but if you don't then you do have to deal with the manager for the delegated domain. That manager may charge a fee for his service.
The current policies of the US domain are on the web page at
Check the "Overview" information.
US Domain Registry
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Date: Thu, 12 Jun 97 18:27:07 GMT From: "William Allen Simpson" <wsimpson@greendragon.com> To: iana@isi.edu Cc: nanog@merit.edu Subject: Re: usdns.org
From: Eric Kozowski <kozowski@structured.net> I received the following from Jon Postel. Posted with his permission.
The USDNS organization is esentially a broker for domain names in the US (and maybe other) domains. ... In the world there are many such services, we all make tradeoffs every day between doing something ourselves vs using a service to do it for us. We all trade money vs time and/or knowledge and/or skill. ... The US Domain Administration does not make any recommendations positive or negative about such services.
Great. Just wanted to be clear on this official policy. We can still register ourselves without paying any service, anywhere in the US domain.
And any "service", fee or no fee, can update the _same_ subdomains. There is no subdomain "ownership".
Also, there was another posting saying that IANA had made a limitation last year for each "service" only serving 50 US sub-domains.
I didn't see any such announcement. Could you update the US domain RFC accordingly?
WSimpson@UMich.edu Key fingerprint = 17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26 DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32 BSimpson@MorningStar.com Key fingerprint = 2E 07 23 03 C5 62 70 D3 59 B1 4F 5E 1D C2 C1 A2
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WSimpson@UMich.edu Key fingerprint = 17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26 DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32 BSimpson@MorningStar.com Key fingerprint = 2E 07 23 03 C5 62 70 D3 59 B1 4F 5E 1D C2 C1 A2