New .us domain names available next week
By Carolyn Duffy Marsan
Network World Fusion, 02/28/02 

The first step in the U.S. government's re-launch of its top-level domain - .us - begins Monday, when companies can start registering their trademarked names with the .us suffix. 

This so-called sunrise period will last until April 9, after which anyone can buy a .us name from the 35 domain name registrars that have signed up to sell them. 

The U.S. Commerce Department selected NeuStar, the Washington, D.C. telephone numbering database operator, to run the .us registry last fall. NeuStar also operates the .biz registry through a joint venture with Melbourne IT called NeuLevel. 

NeuStar hopes to take advantage of the rise in patriotism following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks with the sale of .us names. Target markets include companies doing business in the U.S., state and local government agencies and individuals. 

Even prior to Sept. 11, focus groups showed that "there was very strong sentiments in having an American identity online for businesses, individuals, government agencies and philanthropic organizations," says Robert Poulin, senior vice president of registry services at NeuStar. 

Each country has its own top-level domain, which is operated outside the direct supervision of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the international governing body that oversees names with .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info and .name suffixes. 

Until now, the U.S. government has issued less than 100,000 .us names, and those primarily went to state and local government agencies. The names weren't very popular because they were locality-based and had long, hard-to-remember strings of text separated by dots. The New York Metropolitan Transit Authority, for example, recently replaced its original .us domain name - mta.nyc.ny.us - with the snappier mta.info and promptly grew its Web site traffic more than 10-fold. 

More at: http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2002/0228usnames.html