There is much more to the story. A lot of information can be found at http://www.cybertelecom.org/dns.htm#us On August 3, 1998, NTIA released a Request for Comments for enhancement of the .us domain and then held follow up public forums. On August 17, 2000, NTIA released for comment a draft statement of work. Comments were filed by various groups, however, NTIA apparently never released a public document evaluating the comments and setting forth its decision, based on a rational basis and in compliance with the Administrative Procedures Act. Instead, the Department of Commerce went straight to releasing a requestion for quotations (in other words government procurement, the first step of setting up a govt contract through competitive bids), posted by NIST, on June 13, 2001 (NIST apparently had to conduct the procurement as NTIA lacks appropriate authority). This is a $0 procurement with the government paying and receiving nothing; the company that wins the contract will be permitted to charge fees for registrations. The bidding period closed July 27, 2001. In July of 2001, as a result of the rebel rousing of the likes of Harold Feld, two congressional letters and two letters from public interest groups were sent to Sec. Evans asking for reconsideration. In addition, two editorials and a white paper by former Clinton Advisor Brian Kahin were released. These different groups raise the following objections: * .us is a valuable public resource. If a new contractor is permitted to profit off of this public resource, then the taxpayers ought to receive their share (MAP argued that revenue from .us should be used for public interest programs; this was supported by Sen. Hollings. Rep. Markey recommended that .us be turned over to the FCC for auction.). * The Request for Quotations places US registrants under ICANN�s Uniform Dispute Resolution Procedure (UDRP); instead, disputes should be resolved by US law. The UDRP requirement also violates the Administrative Dispute Resolution Act which prohibits conditioning receipt of a federal benefit on agreeing to mandatory arbitration. * The Request for Quotations fails to ensure that the interests of those with current .us domain names will be protected. * The Request for Quotations gives primary rights to domain names to trademark owners and gives insufficient consideration to First Amendment rights. While the Dept of Commerce has apparently indicated that it will be responding to the Members of Congress, it has also apparently indicated that the show must go on. It is expected that bids were filed by companies such as NetSol and NeuStar. The current Contract with Netsol expires Nov 10, 2001. -B www.cybertelecom.org --- up@3.am wrote:

I thought this might be of interest:

The whois for .us had been working a few weeks ago, but hadn't been since then. I dropped an email to action@isi.edu (who had been hosting the whois server until a few weeks ago) and cc'd usdomreg@nic.us and got the following responses:

Date: Wed, 08 Aug 2001 12:21:22 -0700 From: IPC Computing Services <action@ISI.EDU> To: James Smallacombe <james@pil.net> Cc: action@ISI.EDU, action-team@ISI.EDU Subject: Re: {2001.08.445} .us TLD whois not in DNS

...

http://www.nic.us/register/whois.html

Instructs one to use whois.isi.edu

for whois queries on the .us TLD. It's not in DNS:

[richard namedb james]$ traceroute whois.isi.edu traceroute: unknown host whois.isi.edu

Could you please look into this and let me know if either the website is wrong or this will be fixed?

At the request of the US Department of Commerce, USC/ISI transitioned all support for the US Domain to Verisign at the end of 2000. We appologize that the Verisign supported web site still points to USC/ISI resources but we have no control over their publication of data.

IPC Computing Services

------- 31 hours later from the new registrar (Verisign):

Date: Thu, 09 Aug 2001 19:27:10 -0400 From: US domreg <usdomreg@nic.us> To: James Smallacombe <james@pil.net> Cc: usreply@nic.us Subject: Re: .us TLD whois not in DNS

Dear James,

Thank you for contacting the US Domain Registry.

The whois database was run by ISI until recently. The whois server has now been taken offline and so there is no .us whois server currently. We are currently working on a replacement but there is no estimate on how long that will take. In the meantime, if there are specific domains you wish to have information on, please email them to us and we will manually find the information for you.

Regards,

US Domain Registry www.nic.us usdomreg@nic.us

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ok, so .us isn't very widely used, but why then, did the DOC give it to Verisign?

James Smallacombe PlantageNet, Inc. CEO and Janitor up@3.am http://3.am

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The whois for .us had been working a few weeks ago, but hadn't been since then. I dropped an email to action@isi.edu (who had been hosting the whois server until a few weeks ago) and cc'd usdomreg@nic.us and got the following responses: ...

it's nice to see that whoever's in charge finally got around to removing admii.arl.mil from the ns list. it's been mostly dead and gone for who knows how long... -- |-----< "CODE WARRIOR" >-----| codewarrior@daemon.org * "ah! i see you have the internet twofsonet@graffiti.com (Andrew Brown) that goes *ping*!" andrew@crossbar.com * "information is power -- share the wealth."