Neustar to host Virtual Townhall on .US domains

.us townhall

Neustar, the company that manages the .US domain extension, will be hosting a Virtual TownHall meeting to talk all about .US domains.

For the .US Town Hall Neustar will have several members of the .US Stakeholders Council and representatives from the company participate. This includes;

  • Scott Blake Harris – Host, Chair .US Stakeholder Council
  • Shane Tews – Host, Co-chair .US Stakeholder Council
  • Crystal Peterson – Director, Registry Services Neustar
  • Kimberly Miller – Associate General Counsel Neustar
  • Becky Burr – Deputy General Counsel Neustar

The panel will discuss .US stats, updates on the state of the domain industry in general, the current situation with .US, and considerations for .US growth. Basically the .US Town Hall meeting will give the public the opportunity to learn about the .US namespace directly from the .US registry.
Topics of note on the .US Town Hall meeting include:
1. State of the Domain Industry
2. State of .US domain extension
3. New .US policy proposals under consideration.

Specifically, the .US Town Hall will want the .US community input on
• Allowing .US Privacy
• Releasing Premium Domain Names, including 1 and 2 character .US domains
• IDN (internationalized domain name) registrations in .US.

If you are interested in providing input or hearing about more about the .US, I'd recommend you sign-up for the .US virtual Town Hall.  It seems like Neustar is actively trying to grow the .US domain extension and respond to .US registrants. Directly from

Neustar introduced the .US Town Hall last year to reflect our commitment — and the Commerce Department commitment to the bottom-up, multistakeholder model of DNS management. The public forum is an important part of ensuring that .US continues to be a vibrant namespace that reflects America's diversity, creativity, and innovative spirit. This is an opportunity for stakeholders and enthusiasts to collaborate, sharing expertise and ideas and providing feedback for everything related to .US and the Domain Name Industry. It is also an opportunity to share the policy work of the .US Stakeholders Council over the past 18 months.

The .US domain extension stands for “United States” and is the official country code top level domain (ccTLD) for America. The .US extension was the first ccTLD to have been introduced in 1985. It was one of the first domain extensions to be introduced along with .com, .net, .org, .edu, and .gov. However the .US wasn't open for public registration until 2002. Before that the .US namespace was reserved for government entities and school districts.

Since 2002 registrations have gone up but usage rates of .US have always languished. While other countries ccTLDs have grown and per population size, have much higher usage rates and is more recognizable. If you look in North America .CA, Canada's domain extension, is in wide use and popular for small business to large corporations.

.US recently past the 2 million registration mark. This was mainly due to the fact that Uniregistry, the domain registrar started by Frank Schilling, sold .US domains for 10 cents.  They boosted domain registrations by 300,000 in only a few days.  This was a move by new gTLD (generic top level domains) such as .XYZ.

As anyone will tell you registration numbers don't mean much without people building sites on the domains.  The .US space has found meaning for domain hacks and URL shorteners but that isn't enough to grow the space.

One of the issues that many people have with .US is that it does not allow domain privacy. Again in comparison .CA does allow domain privacy provided by the registry.

It's nice to see that Neustar will be addressing the issues of .US domain privacy.  Many believe that is a big hindrance to growing usage of the .US extension. What are your thoughts? Have you heard of seen complaints about .US domain privacy in the past?

I'd hope Neustar would actually put marketing muscle behind .US domains. Neustar bought out the company that ran the .CO domain extension. Marketing for .CO doesn't seem as voracious these days. I don't see them highlighting companies as much as .ME does for instance.  Neustar manages several other top level domains including .BIZ, .CN, and .NYC. They are also the technical backend providers for many other TLD extensions.

The virtual .US Public Stakeholder Town Hall Meeting is going to take place on October 26, from 3pm – 4:15pm Eastern Standard Time (EST), or 10am – 12pm Pacific Standard Time (PST).  The meeting is expected to last for about 1 hour and 15 minutes.

For those interested in participating in the .US virtual TownHall sign-up here.

Will you be particating in the Town Hall? What do you think of the state of .US? Do you think Neustar should put in more marketing effort?

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