From: Russell Nelson <nelson@crynwr.com>

To: NTIA.NTIAHQ(usdomain)

Date: 8/14/98 3:14pm

Subject: existing, and new

You should definitely grandfather in all existing users of the .us space.

With that as a given, you should add a mapping from .gov.us to the

existing .gov, .mil.us to .mil, and .edu.us to .edu. In time, those

users should migrate to the .us form of their address. New

registrations should be only allowed in the .us form.

Trademarks should go in .FOO.tm.us, where FOO is the USPTO category of

the trademark. In this manner, every US trademark owner has a space

reserved for them in the DNS. There are no conflicts to be resolved

-- the registrar defers to the decision of the court for trademark

ownership disputes.

Geographic names are a crock. Nobody wants to use them. No reason

why the U.S. Postal Service should be involved. None at all.

Instead, create any number of numeric domains (.####.us) under which

anybody can register other numeric (and only numeric) domains, AND

which has a www.us web server which has a search engine to find

companies. The U.S. Department of Commerce runs the nameserver,

automated delegation program, and automated search engine. It goes to

www.####.####.us, downloads "keywords.txt", and adds the first hundred

words (or whatever) to the search engine. All automated, all cheap to

operate.

I believe that Postel proposed something like this a few years ago. I

liked it then. I like it now.

--

-russ nelson <rn-sig@crynwr.com> http://crynwr.com/~nelson

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