Any Advantages to Registering a .us Domain?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Yet another question from my beloved employer. We already have a .com website for our company, but we now have the opportunity to register the same name as .us. Would there be any advantages to this? We’re a manufacturing company in the United States with some international sales which we’re looking to expand, but this is the first I’ve heard of a .us domain.

I’d like your opinions on whether it would be worth our while to register this second domain name. I figure this is the most web-savvy, multi-national bunch of people I have access to.

Thanks for your help,
CJ

2

From an international perspective… it won’t make a big difference, “.com” was in the beginning an exclusive for USA pages, and this idea is still in the mind of most of the people outside USA when you see a page in english ending in just .com (not .com.pe or .com.ar or .com.cz by example). By the same token, using something like .com.us would be redundant, also I have never seen that.
IP adresses also were originaly designed to finish in dot 3 letters (for purpose) and dot 2 letters (for country, except USA). I also heard this “.us” are not so good and were even used to cheat people. I’ve never seen an actual .us website so I don’t know if this is still true.
In few words… I don’t recommend you that.

3

Having a .us domain which redirects to your main .com site would hardly be a huge task. It seems a fairly sensible option to me, to ensure that no embarassing alternative site appears under that name (as the various alternatives of www.whitehouse.xyz demonstate warning there’s things in them you shouldn’t be looking at :wink: ).

As an aside to Seige - have you any evidence that .com was intended as a US-specific domain? Obviously most .coms are American, but it’s by no means universal, and nor is the .com.xy format for other countries.

4

I’ve never heard anything to that effect, and my understanding was that .com was not specific to any one country. I’m also familiar with several websites for companies and organizations outside the U.S.

Thanks for the advice so far. I look forward to reading more.

CJ

5

Excuse me. I misplaced a prepositional phrase. What I meant to say was this:
I’m also familiar with several websites for companies and organizations outside the U.S. which use .com domains.

Time to put my frazzled brain back to work.
CJ

6

I thought that the .us domain was only for state and local entities (the DMV, school boards, etc.) but that doesn’t seem to be the case after a quick look at www.nic.us, so it seems to be possible.

Would it do any good? I doubt it. Most people in the US have been conditioned to go to companyname.com and wouldn’t even bother with a .us domain.

7

The only advantage I could see when registering a site with my friends is that it’s cheaper.
On godaddy it’s $8 for a .com, and only $5 for a .us. So, if your company is looking to save $3, it’s an excellent opportunity.

8

Since IP adresses are really only numbers, there is an organization or something like that (I don’t remember the name right now) that rules all that kind of stuff. From the very beggining some things were stated… as an example the “www.” of the “http://” to make it different from the “ftp://” and of course the terminations .com, .gov, .edu, and only a couple more. As the article I read (a long time ago) said since internet was originated in USA, USA websites won’t need the country extention. Of course internet have changed a lot, and you can physically host your web site anywhere. But having something like www.xyz.com.us is like say Los Angeles instead of LA. “.com” sites are still easier to remember than “.com.yz” sites or any other termination.
If my memory doesn’t betrayal me “.us” extention and similar begun to show up after September 11, to take advantage of the patriotism of north american people. This is a not so important factor when you are talking about marketing, just .com websites still more popular.

9

Since the internet protocols and domain naming conventions were created by a US Military agency (DARPA), it should be a somewhat safe bet that they assumed that “.gov”, “.mil”, and “.com” would be US sites.

In taking a look at the orginal specification docs, it looks like this is definitely implied. While listing the now familiar three letter abbreviations for top level domains, they noted the potential that other countries may want to create domains and included the two letter country abbreviations as another type of top level domain independent of “.com” and the like. This would allow them to be administered outside of the control of DARPA which, at the time, was still the authority.

From RFC 920 - Domain Requirements (1984), in the section “Top Level Domain Requirements”:
…
Countries

     The English two letter code (alpha-2) identifying a country
     according the the ISO Standard for "Codes for the
     Representation of Names of Countries" [5].

     As yet no country domains have been established.  As they are
     established information about the administrators and agents
     will be made public, and will be listed in subsequent editions
     of this memo.

…

I believe that this was right around the time that they split off MILNET from ARPANET and the ARPA group was attempting to shed vestiges of its heritage with the new domain names.

But now looking a later in time, the Network Working Group claims that the intention actually was for “.com” and others to be used by all countries, but in practice they were not.

From RFC 1386 - The US Domain (1992):
…
1.2 Top-Level Domains

The top-level domains in the DNS are EDU, COM, GOV, MIL, ORG, INT,
and NET, and all the 2-letter country codes from the list of
countries in ISO-3166.

Even though the intention was that any educational institution any
where in the world could be registered under the EDU domain, in
practice it has turned out with few exceptions only those in the
United States have registered under EDU, similiary with COM (for
commercial). In other countries, everything is registered under the
2-letter country code, often with some subdivision.
…

Fast forward some more to 1998 when the US government got out of the business of managing domain names (through NSI) and opened up registration to many international registrars. This made it much more convenient for businesses in foreign countries to grab coveted “.com” addresses as registration was decentralized. This did not make it any easier for the “.us” domain, however, as it was still managed by USC and had a very strict and awkward naming convention. This limited the domain use (for the most part) to regional government and educational organizations.

All of this changed two years ago, when the Commerce Department decided sell off administration rights to the “.us” domain in an effort to create a larger namespace for internet addresses (see CNN.com). Now, the limitations of its use have been lifted making it on par with the other top level domains.

So my take is that “.us” would be truly redundant for a US company–something like buying a VHS version of a movie that you already own on DVD. Registration is cheap, however, and you can prevent someone else for taking your business name by grabbing it now.