.us

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Template:Infobox Top level domain

.us is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the United States of America, established in 1985. Registrants of .us domains must be United States citizens, residents, or organizations, or a foreign entity with a presence in the United States. Most registrants in the country have registered for .com, .net, .org and other gTLDs, rather than .us, which has traditionally primarily been used by many state and local governments (although any entity had the option of registering a .us domain). In particular, the domains .gov and .mil have been reserved for US usage, and .edu is mostly limited to US entities (although a small number of non-United States educational institutions have managed to register there).

The original administrator of .us was Jon Postel of the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California. He administrated .us under a sub-contract USC/ISI had from SRI International (who held the .us and the Generic top-level domains contract with the United States Department of Defense) and later Network Solutions (who held the .us and the Generic top-level domains contract with the National Science Foundation.) Registrants could only register third-level domains or higher in a geographic and organizational hierarchy. The vast majority of the geographic sub-domains in .us were delegated to various private entities and .us registrants would register with the delegated administrator for the level they wished to register in (not directly with the .us administrator.) However, from April 2002, second-level domains became available for registration. The .us domain is currently administered by NeuStar Inc. under a United States Department of Commerce contract.

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State administered second-level domains

Note:American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands have top level domains.

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Other administered second-level domains

Since direct registration of second-level names by individuals and companies has been available since 2002, there are some second-level names which permit unofficial third-level registrations. These have included blog.us for use by bloggers, and protozoans.us for sites suitable for viewing by bacteria (a parody of the kids.us domain for child-suitable sites). These do not appear to be active at the present time.

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Namespace within states (largely deprecated)

  • <locality>.<state>.us: cities, counties, parishes, and townships
  • ci.<locality>.<state>.us: city government agencies (subdomain under locality)
  • town.<locality>.<state>.us: town government agencies (subdomain under locality)
  • co.<locality>.<state>.us: county government agencies (subdomain under locality)
  • <school-name>.k12.<state>.us: public school districts
    • <school-name>.pvt.k12.<state>.us: private schools
  • <school-name>.cc.<state>.us: community colleges
  • <school-name>.tec.<state>.us: technical and vocational schools
  • <library-name>.lib.<state>.us: state, regional, city, and county libraries
  • <organization-name>.state.<state>.us: state government agencies
  • <organization-name>.gen.<state>.us: general independent entities (groups not fitting into the above categories)
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Use as English word

Since "us" is a pronoun in the English language, this opens up possibilities for domain names which are English phrases, similar to names used in other ccTLDs, such as i.am and start.at. Help.us would be one possible such domain, possibly of use for soliciting donations. However, there has been little actual use of .us in this manner. Such domains are known as domain hacks. del.icio.us is the most visited website with one of these domain names.

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See also

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External links

Template:CcTLDda:.us eo:.us hu:.us pl:.us ru:.us tr:.us

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