| Introduced | 1985 |
|---|---|
| TLD type | Country code top-level domain |
| Status | Active |
| Registry | Neustar |
| Sponsor | United States Department of Commerce |
| Intended use | Entities connected with  United States |
| Actual use | American business use of its own country code top level domain (ccTLD) is fast growing in popularity |
| Registration restrictions | U.S. nexus requirement can be enforced by challenge, but seldom is |
| Structure | Originally registrations were within complex, 3rd or 4th level hierarchy, but currently direct second-level registrations are allowed; kids.us permits 3rd-level registrations for child-friendly sites |
| Documents | RFC 1480; USDoC agreements with Neustar |
| Dispute policies | usTLD Dispute Resolution Policy (usDRP) |
| Website | nic.us |
.us is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the United States, 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 U.S. usage.
The original administrator of .us was Jon Postel of the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California. He administered .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.
Since the official release of .us as a second-level domain, it has been adopted and developed by a number of private corporations and local citizenry. The .us country code is no longer in the exclusive realm of only governmental agencies.
Contents |
These are derived from postal abbreviations for the states.
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 protozoa.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.
The general format is "<organization-name>.<locality>.<state>.us", where <state> is a state's two-letter postal abbreviation.
Three values of <organization-name> have specific meanings:
Ordinarily, a <locality> is a city, county, parish, or township. Some other names may replace the <locality>:
Under .US Nexus Requirements .US domains may be registered only by the following qualified entities:
To ensure that these requirements are met, NeuStar frequently conducts "spot checks" on registrant information.
To prevent anonymous registrations that do not meet these requirements, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration has ruled that registrants of .us domains may not secure private domain name registration [1].
Registrants are required to provide complete contact information with no omissions. Additional information is also required. [2]
Domain names corresponding to 5- or 9-digit US postal codes or telephone numbers are reserved; a project is underway at zipcode.us to provide locality-specific information under a full set of 5-digit postal-code domains using a format like 90210.us