Industry

Now that Boardwatch is pretty much useless, there's Help in Choosing an ISP.

2:07:47 PM #
categories: Industry

Selling .us:

Until last fall, the United States reserved its .us domain for local governments, schools and libraries, under a nonprofit system that assigned addresses based on locality. For example, the city of Chicago's Web page can be found at www.ci.chi.il.us.

NeuStar executives have said that they will preserve the existing system but also plan to open it up to commercial development, making available simpler addresses such as www.chicago.us.

Simpler? Westchester County, New York, instead of going with westchester.county.ny.us bought westchestergov.com. Now we have road signs which remind us that corporations don't have a monopoly on stupid URLs.

NeuStar's plan is critically flawed, however. Instead of offering third-level domains under, for example, com.us, they're offering second-level domains under .us. This drastically limits the potential namespace. We will see rapid depletion following the .com experience as poachers collect the better names.

11:42:12 AM #
categories: Industry