I completely agree with John here. Note that NTIA, which is responsible for the .us TLD contract for the Dept. of Commerce, has recently issued a new draft RFP for the administration of .us, which you can download at https://sam.gov/workspace/contract/opp/3e5638fb45df4c2e9c342eab64b36c03/view
In particular, page 3 of the Requirements document states: In the early days of the usTLD, individuals, organizations, and state and local governments received .us delegations to provide registry and registration services in the locality space. These “delegated managers” supported a widely distributed hierarchy within the usTLD. ... The direct relationship between the usTLD contractor and the delegated managers continues today. There are 112 usTLD delegated managers as of February 2025. ... In 2001, the Department authorized the expansion of the usTLD structure beyond the “locality space” formula, enabling domain name registrants to register names directly beneath the .us Top Level Domain (e.g., “organization.us”). The usTLD currently serves both purposes and is therefore composed of “locality space” registrations and “second- level” registrations. So perhaps 1480 should be updated to reflect current practice. But much of it is still in practice. Cheers, Andy On Fri, Dec 19, 2025 at 3:56 PM John R Levine <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, 19 Dec 2025, Joe Abley wrote: > > There seems to be some kind of undercurrent of assumption in this thread > that RFC 1480 is a governing legal document for the operation of the US > domain, and that the presence or absence of the word "historic" on the > front page of the document will have a material impact. > > > > Is this a reasonable thing to worry about? > > As we have seen from this discussion, some people apparently believe that > the locality domains described in 1480 are obsolete, or don't exist, or > are being phased out, or won't work any more. As Mike noted about similar > domains in Canada, this can case needless problems when you provide a > locality address to some third party who wrongly imagines it doesn't work. > Changing 1480 to historic would surely reinforce this false belief. > > In fact, most of what 1480 describes is still true. The locality domains > still exist, and the registration process is roughly what it describes, > with some process changes since the original method, sending email to Jon > Postel, regrettably is no longer available. The only significant change > is that in 2002 the registry started accepting 2LD registrations in > addition to the 1480 names. Since then, in the past two and a half > decades nothing about this has changed. > > In short, changing the status of 1480 will cause needless grief to people > using locality names, will cause needless confusion, and will be of no > benefit whatsoever to anyone. So please, can we stop now and talk about > something else? > > Regards, > John Levine, [email protected] > > _______________________________________________ > DNSOP mailing list -- [email protected] > To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] >
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