Got a call this morning from neustar.com, the big stupid company that runs the .us top-level domain: that is, the company that decided to cash in on the .us domain and fouled it all up in the process.
Once upon a time, when a lot of the Internet's administrative work was run by volunteers as a community service, the .us top-level domain was run by an organization called ISI, at the University of Southern California. They had designed the .us domain with a logical hierarchy. Within .us were subdomains for each state (for example, .ca.us) and town (.fresno.ca.us), and volunteers around the country were delegated to administer them; all the domains belonging to users were within those.
Then the government got involved. It assigned the administration of the top level to Network Solutions, Inc., which transferred the state and town domains away from the volunteer administrators and turned them over to companies who contracted with it for the privilege. Users would now have to pay for what once had been available for free, but at least the goal was fairly logical: to provide a professional service ready to handle the Internet boom.
I went to registrar nametamer.com (which administered various chunks of New England) and signed up for the domain gabriel.cambridge.ma.us for my home machine. I had the impression nametamer was a small operation run out of Connecticut run by a techie gal in her off-hours, but she didn't charge much and the service worked.
Things were working too well, evidently, so the Department of Commerce got involved again, and decided to transfer the whole thing again. A firm called Neustar persuaded the government that it was the best candidate to run the .us domain and it got the job, for which the contract specified a price of $0.
Yes, for zero dollars, the government turned management of the .us domain from NSI which had been competent, over to a company whose claim to technical prowess was that it had managed the country's area codes.
What's in it for them? By breaking the geographically-based structure for domain names, they could "flatten the namespace" and start offering names like mycompany.us to the public, and turn .US into just another cluttered category like .COM. They wanted a cash cow.
Ever since neustar took over the .us domain at the start of 2002, its records have been fouled up. Not only couldn't they get the end-user domains straight, they couldn't even keep straight the administrators such as nametamer, which found itself locked out of neustar's systems and unable to update records.
Today, two years later, they called me on the phone asking me if I were the administrator who controlled "fred.cambridge.ma.us". No, you dopes, I'm not an administrator; I just had one little domain, and I got it from nametamer; go talk to them. Apparently neustar has my name on its records as the administrator for a whole bunch of other people's domains.
Maybe I should have said yes and tried to get into the registrar business myself.
