Dot us

Dot us domains

.us

is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the United States, established in 1985. Registrants of  .us domains must be United States citizens, residents, or organizations, or a foreign entity with a presence in the United States. 

Dot US

Domain Names are not allowed to have privacy enabled on the whois, meaning anyone who checks a .US Domain Whois record will see the address of the domain holder.  .US Domains can currently be registered for less than $10 per year.

The original administrator of .us was Jon Postel of the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California. John administered .us under a sub-contract USC/ISI had from SRI International (who held the .us and the Generic top-level domains contract with the United States Department of Defense) and later Network Solutions (who held the .us and the Generic top-level domains contract with the National Science Foundation). Registrants could only register third-level domains or higher in a geographic and organizational hierarchy. The vast majority of the geographic sub-domains in .us were delegated to various private entities and .us registrants register with the delegated administrator for the level they wish to register in, not directly with the .us administrator. Unfortunately this means obtaining a geographic sub-domain requires contacting the delegate, who may or may not be professional or helpful.

From April 2002, second-level domains became available for registration during a landrush with many .us domains registered in the first five minutes, and over 200,000 domains registered in the first day.  The .us domain is currently administered by NeuStar Inc. under a United States Department of Commerce contract.  In December 2004 Neustar released previously reserved domains including States and Cities and highly valuable three letter domains (see Reserved List), many of these domains were caught by drop catchers such as BlueHill, surprisingly Godaddy (who catch the majority of .US domains) were not involved in the catch process even though backorders were placed.

Since the official release of .us as a second-level domain, it has been adopted and developed by a number of private corporations and local citizenry. The .us country code is no longer in the exclusive realm of only governmental agencies, allowing American citizens to register .us domain names anytime they like !