I just received a fishy call from a guy a usdns.org. Bottom line is they want
to bill for .US domain registrations and give us a kickback for the .US
subdomains that we host.
What do any of you know about this group?
==>I just received a fishy call from a guy a usdns.org. Bottom line is they want
==>to bill for .US domain registrations and give us a kickback for the .US
==>subdomains that we host.
==>
==>What do any of you know about this group?
Well, since the two organizations are completely different (.us TLD is
hosted by IANA/ISI), I'd say tell them to stuff it and cc:
us-domain@isi.edu.
chuegen@chuegen-sun:7:~>whois us-dom | more
United States of America top-level domain (US-DOM)
Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)
c/o
University of Southern California
Information Sciences Institute
4676 Admiralty Way
Marina del Rey, CA 90292
Domain Name: US
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
United States Domain Registrar (USDR) us-domain@ISI.EDU
(310) 822-1511
[~~~]
chuegen@chuegen-sun:8:~>whois usdns.org
[rs.internic.net]
Name Consortium, Inc. (USDNS3-DOM)
417 E. Sheridan St. Suite 127
Dania, FL 33004
US
Domain Name: USDNS.ORG
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact, Zone Contact:
Brownley, Oprah Basil (OBB2) oprah@USDNS.COM
954 922-1899 (FAX) 954 922-1652
[~~~]
/cah
That figures.
There be lots of scamming going on in .US, and the IANA is responsible for
all of it. They have handed out hundreds of registries to companies which
aren't even remotely in the same geographic area as the part of the TLD
being served.
One of our customers (the City of Aurora) was badly screwed by the holder of
the delegation for that area; frankly, if anyone deserves to be able to
manage that delegation, its the organization to which the delegation would
refer!
I don't know where Mr. Postel gets his cajones, but they're big and brass
when it comes to this stuff.
Comeon folks we have had this "conversation" on 10 different lists
and I think the nanog folks would appreciate it *NOT* happening
here.
-Rick
a peek at their web page indicates they are *not* related to ISI. i am
not aware of anything that would give them the right to charge for .us
registration. sounds like a big scam to me.
I haven't received anything from them lately, but I am the registrar for
bolton.ma.us, my town. I don't have any intention of charging anyone
anything for delegations (provided they are indeed in the town), but these
folks are trying to sell delegations from the US domain. So far, they've
effectively registered themselves with the US domain registrar for all town
names in the USA which were not already covered by others, and are charging
for the right to have a delegation below a town name.
If they come to me looking to sub-delegate, my fee for them to pay me will
be something like $150 plus time and expenses. For town folks, its free. I
sent a note to ISI indicating my displeasure with the whole thing. I was a
little surprised that ISI let them register thousands of domains.
I just received a fishy call from a guy a usdns.org. Bottom line is they
want
to bill for .US domain registrations and give us a kickback for the .US
subdomains that we host.What do any of you know about this group?
--
Eric Kozowski VP Internet Services
eric@structured.net Structured Network Systems, Inc.
(800)390-5945 Support A Verio Affiliate
(800)881-0962 Sales/Info http://www.structured.net/
PGP Key fingerprint = 0A E4 91 B8 BD CB 3E 95 42 12 04 4E 14 DF 86 76
'They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.' -- Benjamin Franklin 1759
Daniel Senie mailto:dts@openroute.com
Sr. Staff Engineer http://www.openroute.com/
OpenROUTE Networks, Inc. (a wholly owned subsidiary of
Proteon, Inc.)
Date: Wed, 11 Jun 1997 16:47:25 -0400 (EDT)
From: Ben Black <black@zen.cypher.net>
Subject: Re: usdns.org
To: Eric Kozowski <kozowski@structured.net>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
a peek at their web page indicates they are *not* related to ISI. i am
not aware of anything that would give them the right to charge for .us
registration. sounds like a big scam to me.
Aw, come on! There are a half dozen folk that have snarfed up cities in most
states that have no relationship with the state. They charge the usual $50 per
year for registering a domain in your own city!!! I an very unhappy that ISI
has allowed that to happen!
>
> I just received a fishy call from a guy a usdns.org. Bottom line is they want
> to bill for .US domain registrations and give us a kickback for the .US
> subdomains that we host.
>
> What do any of you know about this group?
>
>
> --
> Eric Kozowski VP Internet Services
> eric@structured.net Structured Network Systems, Inc.
> (800)390-5945 Support A Verio Affiliate
> (800)881-0962 Sales/Info http://www.structured.net/
> PGP Key fingerprint = 0A E4 91 B8 BD CB 3E 95 42 12 04 4E 14 DF 86 76
> 'They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
> safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.' -- Benjamin Franklin 1759
>
Dave Nordlund d-nordlund@ukans.edu
University of Kansas 913/864-0450
Computing Services FAX 913/864-0485
Lawrence, KS 66045 KANREN
Any word on whether Postel or the IANA is making anything off of the
commercial registrars actions?
-Deepak.
Any word on whether Postel or the IANA is making anything off of the
commercial registrars actions?
The .US domain is indeed badly screwed up, largely due to well-intentioned
moves by IANA and ISI. The worst problem is the mandatory city.state.us
structure, but that's a different problem from the one here.
Several years ago they decided, not unreasonably, that handling all those
registrations for .US was more work than they wanted to do for free, so
they started delegating by city to volunteer registrars. For a while this
worked just fine, as individuals, schools, and local businesses took over
the delegations for their localities. Nobody charged anything to anyone.
Around the time that NSI started charging for .COM et al. (I don't have the
exact chronology worked out) ISI stated that the .US subregistrars could
charge a nominal fee to defray their expenses. About a year ago several
little companies all got the same idea and started asking for delegations
for every locality in sight, all the large ones as well as tiny ones with
cool names, e.g., surf-city.nj.us, so they could make big bucks charging
people for local names as well as vanity names. (Hey, D00D, wanna be
beachboy@surf-city.nj.us ?) Once I saw what was happening, I grabbed all
the available towns, villages, and counties around here to save them from
the greedsters, as I gather have many other people, but the damage is now
done with hundreds of places in the hands of the speculators.
The registries for a couple of towns where I had names registered got
scooped up before I had a chance to get them myself, and for the past year
I've been getting $10 "renewal" invoices for my old names, all of which
I've ignored, and all of my old names still work. The demand for
geographic names seems to be as low as it ever was, so none of the little
companies is taking in much revenue and they provide rotten service.
My suggestion to ISI at this point would be to distinguish between
"community" registrars and "commercial" registrars. A community registrar
must have a reasonable relation to the place for which it's a registry,
e.g. live or have an office within 20 miles of it, and handle registrations
at no charge. Commercial registries have no such restrictions. In case of
conflicting requests between community and commercial registrars, the
community registrar wins.