I have three locality domains, all with different registrars in Oregon. Two are with unique delegated locality domain registrars (think old school consultancies or ISPs that still exist) and one directly via localitymanagement.us (GoDaddy/USTLD).
One of the registrars is from an out of state operator that has been dead for three years. I tracked his widow down and had a number of cordial conversations over about 18 months. I've helped his widow renew some personal domains but she's recently told me that she's going to stop paying the hosting bill of the locality registrar and it'll shut down June 1st. I've offered to take over hosting, we'll see if she is convinced.
Several other locality users will likely also see their domains disappear once that happens as the USTLD registrar will require a notarized letter from the city/county of that domain to approve any "new" (new in their system) domains. Not easy for any mid or large sized city in the US.
I love locality domains clearly, but the bureaucracy applied since the start has piled up over the years.
I do worry that this poor Seattle ISP is going to get DDoS'ed by outsider (find an appropriate locality please if you go down this route) due to the popularity of this article, though!
In the 90s when learning about the internet I remember reading stuff written by "Jon Postel", a univeristy employee in California
Today, a curious student trying to learn about the internet would probably end up reading stuff written by "Big Tech" and/or academics who have financial relationships with these or other so-called "tech" companies
I remember Postel and one other person, perhaps at SRI, I forget her name, had a plan for these sort of hierarchical geographical domainnames. I recall it was _not_ commercial in nature. It "seemed like" Postel saw the internet, including DNS, as a public service. Needless to say, any such non-commercial vision was not realised
ICANN DNS became a money grab
If Postel had survived to today, would he have sold out like so many of his peers
AFAIK Cooper was never at SRI, but Postel was at one time
Putting aside the inaccurate memory, the point I wish to make as an ordinary computer user reading about the internet is that Postel wrote about the internet as a _public resource_. Check out the tone of this random Postel RFC, for example
Postel received a PhD in Computer Science in 1974 from UCLA and, apparently, he was a _two-finger typist_ who preferred handwritten slides over PowerPoint and used monochrome logos instead of color (I find this interesting; I'm not suggesting anyone else would)
Joyce K Reynolds, who co-authored some of the most important RFCs with Postel on protocols, was a social sciences major (another factoid I find interesting)
The hierarchical geographical domains you are remembering must have been the 2000 '.geo' Top Level Domain (TLD) proposal from SRI. It didn't work out, but I remember thinking at the time that it was a cool idea.
It would have provided geographical information based on a domain encoded grid, not for human but machine consumption (e.g. acme.2e5n.10e30n.geo).
It’s too bad more people don’t understand how the domain industry is structured under ICANN. IMO, the registries are ICANN’s customers, the registrants are part of the product being sold, and the registrars are a liability shield.
It’s a protection racket too. When they first launched generic tld’s, donuts(a shady registry) had a product that didn’t allow domain registration but -did- block registration of a domain across all tlds in case you didn’t want to pay for company-name.[200+ tlds]
Fun fact (you probably remember), you used to report phishing sites with one simple email and they would actually be taken down.
These days I get the feeling a lot of the registrars are essentially/effectively in on it (at least by inaction). A well-run ICANN feels needed, who can track takedown compliance.
I used to have some domains registered with "theparsec.com", and would communicate with the owner, "ML", on occasion. It was great, he was responsive and helped me out if an order didn't go through for some reason.
In 2022, their TLS certificates were off -- a subdomain used by a backend redirect process was no longer valid, so I contacted "ML" and they were unresponsive. I managed to get my domains to a new register by ignoring some TLS warnings and transferring them. As of July of 2022, I have not heard from "ML" and I assume that he passed away. I don't know their identity or what became of them. All I know is that their name is/was Mark.
I did some more creeping, but this is probably the end for me if he doesn't get back to my email. He was involved with real estate, but their realty webpage is offline and the last record in the Internet Archive is from 2018. That's the last time I heard from him as well. My original comment was incorrect -- that's the last time I interacted with his service.
I wonder if the whole thing was on auto-pilot until things eventually broke.
I had found that person, and thought that it could be him. The site that I used did not provide an email address, though. Even the link that you provided shows other addresses than that to me.
It's probably an attempt to maximize search hits. I wonder if they would always be provided if your user-agent matched google's webcrawler UA.
The last email address in your link, the sbcglobal one, is for someone else entirely. She's involved in the church in Springfield, IL. I assume that she got tied in by Mark's surname.
Unfortunately the author is correct that you’re pretty screwed if the locality is no longer delegated. I messaged GoDaddy to register one in Boston, they asked for a _notarized_ letter on the local governments letter head approving. No one within the Boston city government knew what their procedure would be, and those willing to say yes didn’t have a notary around. They ended up citing a state law indicating that no locality domains were to be used for _government_ purposes in MA as their reason to say no, when of course that has no bearing on private use…
If anyone would like to band together to push city of Boston or Cambridge to start approving these, please let me know! I can revive some email chains.
That law was a reaction to a Federal thing (through CISA i think) to migrate all governments to the .gov domain in the US in the name of security and branding.
They were pushing it hard when DNSSEC was being babbled about by cyber people.
To be honest migrating government infrastructure to .gov makes it much easier to at least get some minimal handle on the extent of critical governmental infrastructure.
Totally agree, not a bad idea at all. Some local governments aligned their web presence around the tourism and chamber of commerce type organizations, which made it confusing for people to know where they had to pay their water bill vs. get tourism info.
> They ended up citing a state law indicating that no locality domains were to be used for _government_ purposes in MA as their reason to say no, when of course that has no bearing on private use…
> If anyone would like to band together to push city of Boston or Cambridge to start approving these, please let me know! I can revive some email chains.
I'm confused by this. Some have migrated away from the locality domains but some are still in use even by official/state purposes.
edit -- seems like the server has been "slashdotted" by this thread, I was finally able to get an account created but can't log in. doesn't seem very well coded anyway since I was apparently able to change the password twice using the same activation link lol.
Amazing slow site. If it does manage to find a valid domain, it doesn't show any contact info, nor registration form. Do I need to create an account and log in to see those?
Seems like the company has now suspended newly created accounts and disabled signups... aren't they being paid or required on some kind of government contract to manage this system?
Having a domain under the .us TLD once seemed appealing to me for practical reasons: It's short, consistently inexpensive, and hasn't already sold the vast majority of its useful namespace to squatters.
Unfortunately, it forbids WHOIS privacy services, which makes it a privacy and security hazard for personal domains. Pity, that.
There's almost no real privacy online in the US. When I search for my name my phone number and almost every address I've ever lived at it is publicly retrievable - on multiple sites. Even with a private WHOIS I get spam from various companies via my registrar asking to speak to me about making a website.
You can get some of the major sources to remove you with a service like Optery [0]. Costs a few bucks, but if you let them work at it a few months you can drop the subscription and the effects will linger for a while before you start finding yourself on public databases again.
I used it myself and I have trouble finding information about myself, even with my inside knowledge. If someone is determined enough you probably can't really hide from them, especially if they have any connections to law enforcement or one of the big data sinks. But you can definitely make it harder for casuals.
Might help with phone numbers, but addresses are trivial to find and cannot be removed, if you own property in the United States. Every county publishes property records, searchable by name. Unless you own your house with an LLC, if someone knows or can guess the state you live in, they can 1) search on the property records website of the top 10 counties by population, and if that fails 2) expand to searching other counties until you pop up. Not sure how to mitigate this, other than the LLC method.
People running WHOIS against kylesmith.com might discover that it's owned by someone named Kyle Smith.
I'll actually offer my take: domain names under the US TLD are a shared, public good, and no one should be allowed to anonymously own a shared, public good.
There are still many thousands of three-letter domains for (third-party) sale on .com/net/org though. Sedo.com lists a handful of .net domains that are under $100. Most are more than that though.
can't say .expert that its popular by any measure but I have https://use.expert
In my opinion, there are still some really great short domains available. I actually even know some but don't have the budget to buy them.
The thing with domains is also that they aren't one time, I mean I am happy paying for domains which are 20$ say once even (and this comes as someone frugal but I just love domains) but most of these domains cost quite a lot.
For example use.expert would cost me around 40-50$ per year. I mean its 3-4$ per month so I am happy with it but still, my point is that I absolutely know more domains which I wish to buy but it would just be an hassle long term. I can probably sell them at cheap auctions to recoup the price but it just doesn't feel that worth it to me but overall, yeah.
Nope. Even though you must supply your address in the registration form, a WHOIS request for your locality domain will only show information about the registrar.
This is definitely not true for general .us domains.
I registered one a year or two ago. And assuming my normal default Whois privacy was being applied (I clicked through too fast. Wasn’t paying attention)
I noticed my mistake after the spam bots started hitting me up for their web design products.
That was clearly not true for domains directly under .us when I last read their rules, roughly a year ago.
I suppose it might be true for .city.state.us subdomains, but those fail my first criterion (they're not short), and are themselves a privacy hazard since they substantially narrow the search space for personal info about the domain owner. So it doesn't refute my criticism.
> you can literally write anything in the whois though
It's still fraud though. And there are multiple ways that might trigger an investigation into the validity of your contact info, such as abuse reports, court cases or failing to renew. Some people with axes to grind have been known to get domains of people they don't like taken down just by complaining to the registrar.
Seeing the *.k12.oh.us in the delegated subdomains brought me back to highschool. When I was little I always wondered why the city name was before k12. Didn't know it was structured like that everywhere.
(purists would argue that it can't, but common usage trumps purism)
Also, I will point out that, even from the perspective of formal logic, the original statement has "city or county". In other words there is no single fixed C - C could be a city or a country. Since counties can be larger than cities, it stands to reason that a school district could be larger than the size of a city while being equal to the size of a county. And can be smaller than the size of a county while being equal to the size of a city.
So, even assuming that the original statement is taken to have the logical meaning you've interpreted, that meaning does not technically forbid school districts from being equal to the size of a county (as long as that county is larger than some city, so that we can still make the true statement "this district is larger than a city"), nor from being equal to the size of a city (as long as that city is smaller than some county, so that we can still make the true statement "this district is smaller than a county").
I managed a couple ".k12.oh.us" domains back in the day. The employees hated the domain in their email addresses, but I found it very logical. I saw all kinds screwed-up addresses in bounce messages forwarded to my company address when "can't email people in the District" tickets got sent my way (a lot of "districtname.oh.k12.us", etc). I guess it wasn't so simple for "normies".
One of the schools ended up using a ".com" domain that was one character longer than their ".k12.oh.us" domain but easier to tell people verbally (I guess).
I also managed a "co._countyname_.oh.us" domain, too. Again, universal hatred for the domain in email addresses, and again I found it logical and reasonable.
The County government ended-up getting a ".gov" domain that was 5 characters longer than their "co._countyname_.oh.us" domain and, in my opinion, hell to tell people verbally ("It's Countyname County Ohio dot Gov. Yes-- all one word. The words County and Ohio are spelled out. No, not O-H-- Ohio is spelled out." >sigh<)
Once you stop thinking of domain as an addressing tool and start thinking of them as branding, the complaints will make sense. "Dot k12 dot oh dot us" is a terrible brand name.
Everything needs branding. "United States of America" and "USA" is branding. Good branding makes people's lives easier and (on average) a tiny bit happier. That has some impact on quality of life. Spending a few tax dollars on improving people's QOL is a good thing if you ask me.
As a specific example, imagine how many less people would enroll in Medicare if instead it was called Lifelong Assistance in Meeting Medical Needs of Aging Able-Bodied Population. Just finding eligibility criteria and the correct forms to submit would be 10 times harder.
(I think it would be even better if Medicare and Medicaid weren't so similar and easy to confuse with one another. Recently I had to explain both concepts to an immigrant who knew about neither but found contradictory information online about both.)
Having a strong, consistent, easy to use name IS a positive.
It’s easy to remember, which means more “engagement”. For a local government organization, that means more support, more feedback, and the constituents are “getting their moneys worth” more than a government organization that they can’t ever interact with.
They nearly all did that because the average person never figured out how the DNS hierarchy worked, and many of them never even got comfortable with the idea of having more than one dot in a domain (with the exception of a “www.” prefix). So it was easier for each district to just make up a random .com or .org.
In Germany it is possible to register an ENUM domain for a phone number. This provides a DNS mapping from the E164 number to DNS records, e.g. for IP phones, etc.
Decentralized and under user control, no shitty silos like FaceTime, WhatsApp.
ENUM stands for “Telephone Number Mapping.” It is essentially a bridge between the world of telecommunications and the Internet. With a single ENUM domain, you can combine all your contact options under your familiar phone number:
The main point of ENUM was compatibility with open SIP, unfortunately that never really happened and most SIP operators do not accept incoming calls from public internet (and do not route outgoing calls based on ENUM).
Some similarities to *.<lastname>.name -- one of which is that the Public Suffix List thinks you're part of a single site with others you have no control over. Another is the weird registration procedure, but this one is weirder!
This is probably not the kind of approach to taking out new domain names you should encourage. A lot of other causes might think this is their way to set up an "official" representation of their strongly held political beliefs, and I think you can imagine where that might go with some groups.
My city already has to publicly list and host foia requests and host documents provided, if they were provided electronically. Most of the requests are for permit drawings, which are provided on paper to the local reprographics company and are not digitized, but most of the potentially annoying requests result in a pdf that's publicly available from a portal linked by the city. Not sure why it would be annoying, even in the slightest, to have it also available somewhere else.
https://codify.nyc is the one I am going to be launching first, hopefully in a few weeks. I only have 100 or so cities on board and live right now. They have been very useful in understanding all the mechanics and nuance of delivering services at the city/local level.
Your project looks interesting, let me know if you see any place we could work together.
Sorry for maybe misunderstanding, but isn't it supposed to be "new-york.us.codify.city" you're about to launch, given the other examples you've made? Wouldn't "codify.nyc" be the wrong way around?
Nope. Even though you must supply your address in the registration form, a WHOIS request for your locality domain will only show information about the registrar.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding their statement but unless something recently changed this is not true. The .US TLD does not permit whois privacy services. The full legal name and address of the registrant will be shown in my experience and I could not find a registrar that would deviate from this.
Are they offering delegation of sub-domains of some domains they purchased perhaps? The example they gave did not suggest this if that is so. If that is the case then whois does not really apply unless they are giving different answers in their whois for sub-domains assuming their whois would be queried.
That is why I opted for .org for a small town that I operated not for official purposes as per the banner a website for in my spare time. When using a .US one can register it in the name of a company or the city can register it themselves through their own government to avoid a persons personal information being listed. Ensure auto-renew is enabled when assisting a city government as people come and go. Pay as far in advance for as many years as possible.
Maybe that’s only for registering primary domains and not subdomains?
That is true and would explain my confusion on this matter if they have some list of apex domains they are dynamically creating sub-domains for. Honestly if this is the case I would avoid participating in this. This puts the control of the domain (sub-domain) in their hands for your city. Cities and states can already use sub-domains of their countries .gov domain structure which I realize is full of its own issues but that's another topic all together. Cities can also get citystate.gov in some states but I don't know how that process works.
This project would likely be shut down the first time someone complains to their government about one of the sites.
Seeing the list of contacts for delegated subdomains reminds me of a time when there were a lot more local ISP's. Inreach.com for Stockton, lodinet (possibly an ISP?) for Lodi..
But the one that really shocked me was https://www.snowcrest.com/mysc/ - which seems to still be up and running?? I wonder if the login page for webmail (ISP-provided email was a thing! And even hosting space!) still works.
I worked at a tiny ISP in 2000. We had nationwide (maybe worldwide?) dialups through MegaPoP [1]; they would passthrough auth for user@dgx.net to our radius server, and charge us (IIRC) $5 for each user that successfully authenticated every month. I think we charged $10/month for local dialup only (where they called into our T1 modem bank) and $20/month for nationwide dialup... at least until our modem bank T1 failed and we couldn't get the telco to fix it so we just pushed everyone to the megapop numbers.
[1] I have no idea what they're called now. There's a huge chain of acquisitions. They may have stopped serving this market, but someone still is.
Neat! I didn't know how that worked. The little ISP I used to do some things for had physical POPs in different cities and AFAIK never went with Megapop or similar. Eventually, their POPs became all-in-one card cage devices that took a combination of PRI and T1 circuits and screwed them together with PPP, which seemed quite highly integrated to me at that time.
It does look like these may be Starnet/Megapop numbers, based on the panix.motd.megapop newsgroup mentioned on Panix's website. I did spend a minute trying to find who (if anyone) is steering the remaining dregs of Megapop, but I didn't make it very far.
I called a couple of them that were nearby and a modem answered.
I'm not interested in dialup data services at all at this point in 2026. I have no remaining means with which to use such a thing. The last cell phone I had that could act like a modem got retired in 2009 and the last time I had a dialtone in my house was 2010.
But if I had to guess, then I'd guess that these time machines are still operational.
*.eu.org, was (is) an early attempt at something similar this side of the pond, starting in the early 2000s, also free although community managed, but still surviving. Used to be a good way to get a free "proper" domain delegation rather than a shitty iframe alias soon to become ad-ridden, or banner-ridden in those days should I say. Good for 1337 IPv6 hostnames for IRC as well.
From Wikipedia: The name Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu translates roughly as "the summit where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, the slider, climber of mountains, the land-swallower who travelled about, played his kōauau (flute) to his loved one".
unfortunately, whomever set that up didn't do it right. http to mission.sf.ca.us works, but if you do https, it's broken. The cert isn't for that, and if you ignore that, then you get sent to http://netisland.net/
I had one, registered I think in 1991, back in the uucp bang days. Had to give it up due to changes in requirements and IIRC Nustar being a real pain. Would like to get it back but no desire to jump through hoops to do so.
Anyone know why some larger cities are not listed? For example, I am noticing that Oakland, CA is missing. This would have been a major city in 1992 when the list was created as well.
Someone would have had to have signed up to administer the domain during the time that signups were available. In 1992, I think interest would have been pretty low in general. And once the internet became widely known, something.city.state.us domains were pretty unlikable. About the only thing they have going for them is the low low price of (usually) free.
That indicates that approval has been rolled up into GoDaddy at this point, and you’ll have to get a notarized letter from the city for them to issue you a domain.
Remarkable, I had absolutely no idea I could do this in my state. I suspect this post is going to cause a spike in applications as folks like me discover we can have one for free.
Definitely keep in mind that right or wrong, these hosts are unusual as far as most commercial services are concerned and it can reveal annoying edge cases in their software.
Use something like ebay@shipping.example.com and they send to ebay@example.com
I had to check the server logs to find why I wasn't receiving any mail and now need a top level alias just for eBay to handle their broken mail infrastructure.
True. I struggled to get signed up for my COVID vaccine back in 2021 because Walgreens wouldn't accept that my totally valid .rodeo email address could possibly exist.
I still use that domain for most corporate accounts. Currently, my wireless carrier refuses to believe I exist in some of their systems (but not others) because of it.
Fortunately, escalating complaints with large corporations with shitty practices is a hobby of mine.
I wonder how reliable this is. Will AWS lightsail continue to work indefinitely for free? What if AWS changes the system in some way? What if the person hosting my locality becomes unavailable?
For some reason, I was using ICANN's lookup (lookup.icann.org) which came up empty. But yes, a simple whois from the commandline gave me the right contact. Thanks!
Can you setup wildcards? Like for example *.[name].san-fransisco.ca.us? That way I can do this once for my own name and have it setup for all future needs as well.
And it ends there with an NXDOMAIN. Unsurprisingly, a list archived in 2009[1] is no longer accurate. If I'm reading this Internet Monthly Report[2] correctly, that domain came into existence in October 1998.
I was hoping there would be something funny like twatt.worcs.uk or reading.berks.uk ... That aside, what would you do with such a domain? You could register x.uk with Nominet UK presumably. Just a small matter of the bill.
That gets extremely complicated. My town straddles the border between 2 counties. And you can't trivially have subdomains for counties and cities at the same level, because Wyoming has a Laramie city but it's in Albany County, not the neighboring Laramie County.
Did this just inspire the next "Falsehoods programmers believe about... Federalism"?
Virginia cities are independent, not within counties. And there's both a Fairfax City and Fairfax County. Making things even more confusing, the county seat is Fairfax City despite the city not being part of the county. The county has fairfaxcounty.gov while the city has fairfaxva.gov.
There are a handful of other independent cities in the US, but the vast majority are in Virginia.
If you have hierarchical naming, which DNS does, then the problem of name clashes is always a problem for whoever sits above those names and they can resolve it however they like.
If your state thought it was a good idea to have two cities named "Star City" that's on them to resolve however they like. Trial by endurance for the city mayor? Draw lots? Everybody in the state votes? Not my monkeys, not my circus.
New York City is a place so nice
Everybody says it so they had to name it twice
New York my happy love's you
(I love you very much)
I could not live without you
So let's always keep in touch
You're right, but typically, when two towns in a state share a name, only one is an incorporated city at most. The other, or both, are usually unincorporated communities. Normally, unincorporated communities do not receive a city.state.us locality domain.
For city.state.us, I'm pretty sure first to file (while filing was available) wins...
Ohio doesn't (or at least historically didn't) have a highlander restriction for incorporated cities.
Oakwood, Cuyahoga County was incorporated in 1951 although Oakwood, Montgomery County was incorporated in 1908. There's also an Oakwood in Paulding County, but its wikipedia page doesn't have an incorporation date or explicitly declare it incorporated or not. I thought there was a famous Ohio city with a same named city elsewhere, but I must have been thinking of somewhere else. I will note that Pennsylvania has an awful lot of same named Townships.
City name in the US ends up being a pretty wild concept when you dig into the details. Often what people are using as a 'city name' is really the name of their post office which statistically has a high correlation with the city they live in. But of course, lots of people live outside incorporated cities, and postal boundaries are independent of political boundaries.
This is really cool, but scrolling through the list I find it hilarious that the seventh largest city in the USA has no locality domain but small towns in my home state that I've never even heard of have one.
I have three locality domains, all with different registrars in Oregon. Two are with unique delegated locality domain registrars (think old school consultancies or ISPs that still exist) and one directly via localitymanagement.us (GoDaddy/USTLD).
One of the registrars is from an out of state operator that has been dead for three years. I tracked his widow down and had a number of cordial conversations over about 18 months. I've helped his widow renew some personal domains but she's recently told me that she's going to stop paying the hosting bill of the locality registrar and it'll shut down June 1st. I've offered to take over hosting, we'll see if she is convinced.
Several other locality users will likely also see their domains disappear once that happens as the USTLD registrar will require a notarized letter from the city/county of that domain to approve any "new" (new in their system) domains. Not easy for any mid or large sized city in the US.
I love locality domains clearly, but the bureaucracy applied since the start has piled up over the years.
I do worry that this poor Seattle ISP is going to get DDoS'ed by outsider (find an appropriate locality please if you go down this route) due to the popularity of this article, though!
RIP Jon.
"RIP Jon."
In the 90s when learning about the internet I remember reading stuff written by "Jon Postel", a univeristy employee in California
Today, a curious student trying to learn about the internet would probably end up reading stuff written by "Big Tech" and/or academics who have financial relationships with these or other so-called "tech" companies
I remember Postel and one other person, perhaps at SRI, I forget her name, had a plan for these sort of hierarchical geographical domainnames. I recall it was _not_ commercial in nature. It "seemed like" Postel saw the internet, including DNS, as a public service. Needless to say, any such non-commercial vision was not realised
ICANN DNS became a money grab
If Postel had survived to today, would he have sold out like so many of his peers
I like to pretend he would not but I have no idea
I believe the document I'm thinking of may have been RFC 1480
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1480.txt
If so, the other person was Ann W Cooper
AFAIK Cooper was never at SRI, but Postel was at one time
Putting aside the inaccurate memory, the point I wish to make as an ordinary computer user reading about the internet is that Postel wrote about the internet as a _public resource_. Check out the tone of this random Postel RFC, for example
https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1591.txt
Postel received a PhD in Computer Science in 1974 from UCLA and, apparently, he was a _two-finger typist_ who preferred handwritten slides over PowerPoint and used monochrome logos instead of color (I find this interesting; I'm not suggesting anyone else would)
Joyce K Reynolds, who co-authored some of the most important RFCs with Postel on protocols, was a social sciences major (another factoid I find interesting)
The hierarchical geographical domains you are remembering must have been the 2000 '.geo' Top Level Domain (TLD) proposal from SRI. It didn't work out, but I remember thinking at the time that it was a cool idea.
It would have provided geographical information based on a domain encoded grid, not for human but machine consumption (e.g. acme.2e5n.10e30n.geo).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.geo
In a similar vein there is the 'e164.arpa' domain for mapping telephone numbers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number_mapping
> ICANN DNS became a money grab
It’s too bad more people don’t understand how the domain industry is structured under ICANN. IMO, the registries are ICANN’s customers, the registrants are part of the product being sold, and the registrars are a liability shield.
One day there will be a grab for .com.
It’s a protection racket too. When they first launched generic tld’s, donuts(a shady registry) had a product that didn’t allow domain registration but -did- block registration of a domain across all tlds in case you didn’t want to pay for company-name.[200+ tlds]
Fun fact (you probably remember), you used to report phishing sites with one simple email and they would actually be taken down.
These days I get the feeling a lot of the registrars are essentially/effectively in on it (at least by inaction). A well-run ICANN feels needed, who can track takedown compliance.
Abuse handling is a mess. AFAIK, the registries, registrars, and ICANN all share responsibility in terms of mitigation. There’s no consistency.
The entire domain squatting/parking industry exists because filing an ICANN dispute costs more than paying the squatter. Absolutely insane.
In hindsight, quite lucky it’s a California non profit. That allowed us to stop the dot-org sale.
I still remember when they started charging for domains. Until late 1995, they were free.
I used to have some domains registered with "theparsec.com", and would communicate with the owner, "ML", on occasion. It was great, he was responsive and helped me out if an order didn't go through for some reason.
In 2022, their TLS certificates were off -- a subdomain used by a backend redirect process was no longer valid, so I contacted "ML" and they were unresponsive. I managed to get my domains to a new register by ignoring some TLS warnings and transferring them. As of July of 2022, I have not heard from "ML" and I assume that he passed away. I don't know their identity or what became of them. All I know is that their name is/was Mark.
The internet is weirdly good for creeping on people with this level of detail —
https://nationalpublicdata.com/people/l/mark-lord/nv/reno/pd...
Looks like you can reach him at mark84@gmail if you want to say ‘hi’.
I did some more creeping, but this is probably the end for me if he doesn't get back to my email. He was involved with real estate, but their realty webpage is offline and the last record in the Internet Archive is from 2018. That's the last time I heard from him as well. My original comment was incorrect -- that's the last time I interacted with his service.
I wonder if the whole thing was on auto-pilot until things eventually broke.
I had found that person, and thought that it could be him. The site that I used did not provide an email address, though. Even the link that you provided shows other addresses than that to me.
Yeah it’s weird how they obfuscate some and surface different emails - this one seems to have both in normal and incognito mode: https://www.fastpeoplesearch.com/mark-lord_id_G-414558371175...
It's probably an attempt to maximize search hits. I wonder if they would always be provided if your user-agent matched google's webcrawler UA.
The last email address in your link, the sbcglobal one, is for someone else entirely. She's involved in the church in Springfield, IL. I assume that she got tied in by Mark's surname.
The notarized letter may be easier to get than you think - if you live in the city/county. The key is being professional, polite, and present.
Super interesting.
Naive question, what do you use the locality domain for?
Unfortunately the author is correct that you’re pretty screwed if the locality is no longer delegated. I messaged GoDaddy to register one in Boston, they asked for a _notarized_ letter on the local governments letter head approving. No one within the Boston city government knew what their procedure would be, and those willing to say yes didn’t have a notary around. They ended up citing a state law indicating that no locality domains were to be used for _government_ purposes in MA as their reason to say no, when of course that has no bearing on private use…
If anyone would like to band together to push city of Boston or Cambridge to start approving these, please let me know! I can revive some email chains.
That law was a reaction to a Federal thing (through CISA i think) to migrate all governments to the .gov domain in the US in the name of security and branding.
They were pushing it hard when DNSSEC was being babbled about by cyber people.
To be honest migrating government infrastructure to .gov makes it much easier to at least get some minimal handle on the extent of critical governmental infrastructure.
Totally agree, not a bad idea at all. Some local governments aligned their web presence around the tourism and chamber of commerce type organizations, which made it confusing for people to know where they had to pay their water bill vs. get tourism info.
> They ended up citing a state law indicating that no locality domains were to be used for _government_ purposes in MA as their reason to say no, when of course that has no bearing on private use… > If anyone would like to band together to push city of Boston or Cambridge to start approving these, please let me know! I can revive some email chains.
I'm confused by this. Some have migrated away from the locality domains but some are still in use even by official/state purposes.
Here's the website for the Newton, MA public schools: https://www.newton.k12.ma.us/
Belmont: https://www.belmont.k12.ma.us/
I believe Cambridge used to use one as well but I can't confirm that.
This list of (supposedly 7388, didn't realize there even were that many?) of them can apparently now be registered online replacing the email method in the OP: https://localitymanagement.us/registrar/domain/delegatedzone...
edit -- seems like the server has been "slashdotted" by this thread, I was finally able to get an account created but can't log in. doesn't seem very well coded anyway since I was apparently able to change the password twice using the same activation link lol.
Amazing slow site. If it does manage to find a valid domain, it doesn't show any contact info, nor registration form. Do I need to create an account and log in to see those?
Seems like the company has now suspended newly created accounts and disabled signups... aren't they being paid or required on some kind of government contract to manage this system?
I tried to go through that site earlier today but they wanted a notarized letter from the city gov which, yeah, that's not going to happen.
Now it's showing "self registration is currently disabled, please contact customer support"
> "Slashdotted"
Here's a nickel, kid. Get yourself a better computer.
Preferably a beowulf cluster of them.
Having a domain under the .us TLD once seemed appealing to me for practical reasons: It's short, consistently inexpensive, and hasn't already sold the vast majority of its useful namespace to squatters.
Unfortunately, it forbids WHOIS privacy services, which makes it a privacy and security hazard for personal domains. Pity, that.
There's almost no real privacy online in the US. When I search for my name my phone number and almost every address I've ever lived at it is publicly retrievable - on multiple sites. Even with a private WHOIS I get spam from various companies via my registrar asking to speak to me about making a website.
You can get some of the major sources to remove you with a service like Optery [0]. Costs a few bucks, but if you let them work at it a few months you can drop the subscription and the effects will linger for a while before you start finding yourself on public databases again.
I used it myself and I have trouble finding information about myself, even with my inside knowledge. If someone is determined enough you probably can't really hide from them, especially if they have any connections to law enforcement or one of the big data sinks. But you can definitely make it harder for casuals.
[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/optery
I just can't get myself to pay for this problem that's ultimately a failure of the government and relies on another corporation behaving with my data
fortunately I'm a California resident so looks like that government has passed a solution that's free, thanks for sharing that guys
Here in sweden, personal data such as name, address, income, birth date, personal number, car ownership, etc. is public by design.
I find it interesting how the view on this differs depending on country and what people are used to.
It's worth sitting down for an hour and filing a bunch of information redaction requests.
Might help with phone numbers, but addresses are trivial to find and cannot be removed, if you own property in the United States. Every county publishes property records, searchable by name. Unless you own your house with an LLC, if someone knows or can guess the state you live in, they can 1) search on the property records website of the top 10 counties by population, and if that fails 2) expand to searching other counties until you pop up. Not sure how to mitigate this, other than the LLC method.
There are services that will submit this information to hundreds of sites for you.
I used incogni and it seemed to have a positive result.
https://incogni.com/
Or if you're in California: https://privacy.ca.gov/drop/
Thank you! How’d you find out about this?
It was in the news when it went into effect at the beginning of the year.
People running WHOIS against kylesmith.com might discover that it's owned by someone named Kyle Smith.
I'll actually offer my take: domain names under the US TLD are a shared, public good, and no one should be allowed to anonymously own a shared, public good.
Yes, I have a 3 letter .us domain that I’ve had for a while. Hard to get a three letter domain in any other popular TLD.
There are still many thousands of three-letter domains for (third-party) sale on .com/net/org though. Sedo.com lists a handful of .net domains that are under $100. Most are more than that though.
> for (third-party) sale
Many of us find it unethical to give money to scalpers.
> a handful of .net domains that are under $100
And this is why.
can't say .expert that its popular by any measure but I have https://use.expert
In my opinion, there are still some really great short domains available. I actually even know some but don't have the budget to buy them.
The thing with domains is also that they aren't one time, I mean I am happy paying for domains which are 20$ say once even (and this comes as someone frugal but I just love domains) but most of these domains cost quite a lot.
For example use.expert would cost me around 40-50$ per year. I mean its 3-4$ per month so I am happy with it but still, my point is that I absolutely know more domains which I wish to buy but it would just be an hassle long term. I can probably sell them at cheap auctions to recoup the price but it just doesn't feel that worth it to me but overall, yeah.
From TFA:
Will WHOIS requests leak my address?
Nope. Even though you must supply your address in the registration form, a WHOIS request for your locality domain will only show information about the registrar.
This is definitely not true for general .us domains.
I registered one a year or two ago. And assuming my normal default Whois privacy was being applied (I clicked through too fast. Wasn’t paying attention)
I noticed my mistake after the spam bots started hitting me up for their web design products.
That was clearly not true for domains directly under .us when I last read their rules, roughly a year ago.
I suppose it might be true for .city.state.us subdomains, but those fail my first criterion (they're not short), and are themselves a privacy hazard since they substantially narrow the search space for personal info about the domain owner. So it doesn't refute my criticism.
Hrmm... I just tried this from my personal .us domain I've had for 23 years and it shows all my info.
you can literally write anything in the whois though
registrars have forwarded me ICANN notices about having info verification for 10 years and nothing happened
nothingburger
"you can literally drive as fast as you want on the highway"
> you can literally write anything in the whois though
It's still fraud though. And there are multiple ways that might trigger an investigation into the validity of your contact info, such as abuse reports, court cases or failing to renew. Some people with axes to grind have been known to get domains of people they don't like taken down just by complaining to the registrar.
you can literally write anything in the whois though
Can confirm.
I have a domain that's had outdated whois information since 2006. Nobody cares.
Even when it was up to date, it never got any spam, I suspect because the contact information was in a country that wasn't valuable to spammers.
Good luck in your gamble.
ICE getting 4th jobs enforcing WHOIS registration data soon.
Seeing the *.k12.oh.us in the delegated subdomains brought me back to highschool. When I was little I always wondered why the city name was before k12. Didn't know it was structured like that everywhere.
School districts are often supersets of municipalities.
This is the correct answer.
From RFC 1386, Section 3.3.1:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1386#page-12What a wierd phrasing. It reads to me like it excludes the possibility of it being the same.
"can be" ≠ "must be"
"can be" is used to list all possible values, which is where the confusion arises. It sounds like: ∀x, x>C v x<C.
"Might be", I think would be better.
"can" can be a synonym for "might" / "may"
(purists would argue that it can't, but common usage trumps purism)
Also, I will point out that, even from the perspective of formal logic, the original statement has "city or county". In other words there is no single fixed C - C could be a city or a country. Since counties can be larger than cities, it stands to reason that a school district could be larger than the size of a city while being equal to the size of a county. And can be smaller than the size of a county while being equal to the size of a city.
So, even assuming that the original statement is taken to have the logical meaning you've interpreted, that meaning does not technically forbid school districts from being equal to the size of a county (as long as that county is larger than some city, so that we can still make the true statement "this district is larger than a city"), nor from being equal to the size of a city (as long as that city is smaller than some county, so that we can still make the true statement "this district is smaller than a county").
MAY is the correct choice.
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2119
This is not in the context of a requirement level. The definition of MAY as defined there makes no sense here.
I managed a couple ".k12.oh.us" domains back in the day. The employees hated the domain in their email addresses, but I found it very logical. I saw all kinds screwed-up addresses in bounce messages forwarded to my company address when "can't email people in the District" tickets got sent my way (a lot of "districtname.oh.k12.us", etc). I guess it wasn't so simple for "normies".
One of the schools ended up using a ".com" domain that was one character longer than their ".k12.oh.us" domain but easier to tell people verbally (I guess).
I also managed a "co._countyname_.oh.us" domain, too. Again, universal hatred for the domain in email addresses, and again I found it logical and reasonable.
The County government ended-up getting a ".gov" domain that was 5 characters longer than their "co._countyname_.oh.us" domain and, in my opinion, hell to tell people verbally ("It's Countyname County Ohio dot Gov. Yes-- all one word. The words County and Ohio are spelled out. No, not O-H-- Ohio is spelled out." >sigh<)
I'm still mildly annoyed every time usps.gov redirects me to usps.com
Once you stop thinking of domain as an addressing tool and start thinking of them as branding, the complaints will make sense. "Dot k12 dot oh dot us" is a terrible brand name.
I have a hard time with public dollars going to "branding" but I do recognize it's a concern for some people and I'm a vastly minority opinion.
Everything needs branding. "United States of America" and "USA" is branding. Good branding makes people's lives easier and (on average) a tiny bit happier. That has some impact on quality of life. Spending a few tax dollars on improving people's QOL is a good thing if you ask me.
As a specific example, imagine how many less people would enroll in Medicare if instead it was called Lifelong Assistance in Meeting Medical Needs of Aging Able-Bodied Population. Just finding eligibility criteria and the correct forms to submit would be 10 times harder.
(I think it would be even better if Medicare and Medicaid weren't so similar and easy to confuse with one another. Recently I had to explain both concepts to an immigrant who knew about neither but found contradictory information online about both.)
Public dollars or not, it IS branding.
Having a strong, consistent, easy to use name IS a positive.
It’s easy to remember, which means more “engagement”. For a local government organization, that means more support, more feedback, and the constituents are “getting their moneys worth” more than a government organization that they can’t ever interact with.
It’s a clear win for using your dollars BETTER
Why would you have a problem with public dollars being used for effective communication?
.gov should never have been expanded to outside the US federal government.
(.com should never have been expanded to outside US-headquartered companies, either.)
The second is hard to justify unless you are willing to say .com should have been replaced with .com.us
Agreed on both.
mayo.k12.sc.us was my high school. It seems a shame they're not still using it.
Seeing the .k12.oh.us in the delegated subdomains brought me back to highschool.*
When I was in my wandering days before there were search engines, I would always enter http://travel.state.*st*.us, or http://travel.*st*.us to look up tourism web sites.
It was unusual for a city or state to not have a travel.city.state.us, or travel.state.us domain.
Our school and town dropped all the .mi.us domains and they have their own domains now, why would they do that? I know it used to be k12 too.
They nearly all did that because the average person never figured out how the DNS hierarchy worked, and many of them never even got comfortable with the idea of having more than one dot in a domain (with the exception of a “www.” prefix). So it was easier for each district to just make up a random .com or .org.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CsN6rbonMo is basically perfectly accurate
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gNFFZpIDU8 (we need .egg and .muffin)
In Germany it is possible to register an ENUM domain for a phone number. This provides a DNS mapping from the E164 number to DNS records, e.g. for IP phones, etc.
Decentralized and under user control, no shitty silos like FaceTime, WhatsApp.
ENUM stands for “Telephone Number Mapping.” It is essentially a bridge between the world of telecommunications and the Internet. With a single ENUM domain, you can combine all your contact options under your familiar phone number:
https://www.denic.de/en/products/enum-domains/
The main point of ENUM was compatibility with open SIP, unfortunately that never really happened and most SIP operators do not accept incoming calls from public internet (and do not route outgoing calls based on ENUM).
Sadly ENUM is dead or buried or both for many countries.
I saw this lets you do Fax over IP. Any other advantages or usecases?
I don't know if this gets much personal use, seems real cumbersome.
But this is of huge interest to carriers, since it allows them to skip the PSTN/peering cost when the callee endpoint is an IP phone.
There is private ENUM for carrier use I recall, not sure what the current status is, with LTE/VoLTE, RCS etc.pp.
http://dam3d3.free.fr/PFE/Pathfinder/GSMA_PathFinder_WebSite...
Here the list of countries that have ENUM delegated for their country code.
https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/inr/enum/Pages/delegations.aspx
Time travel.
Some similarities to *.<lastname>.name -- one of which is that the Public Suffix List thinks you're part of a single site with others you have no control over. Another is the weird registration procedure, but this one is weirder!
Apparently VeriSign plans to discontinue .name: https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/consensus-policies/rsep-2...
> and existing third level domain names will be terminated
Wow! The risks of being esoteric
I want to set one up now and use it to call out the city board members taking kickbacks from flock.
This is probably not the kind of approach to taking out new domain names you should encourage. A lot of other causes might think this is their way to set up an "official" representation of their strongly held political beliefs, and I think you can imagine where that might go with some groups.
"Don't use your free speech because other people might use theirs in ways you don't like"
Why would city board members care what your domain name is?
Oh they probably don't. But it might annoy them slightly if the foia docs were hosted there.
My city already has to publicly list and host foia requests and host documents provided, if they were provided electronically. Most of the requests are for permit drawings, which are provided on paper to the local reprographics company and are not digitized, but most of the potentially annoying requests result in a pdf that's publicly available from a portal linked by the city. Not sure why it would be annoying, even in the slightest, to have it also available somewhere else.
I'm working on something like this... its: <city-name>.<country-iso2>.codify.city e.g.: https://los-angeles.us.codify.city or https://paris.fr.codify.city etc..... my goal is to replace sites from https://www.civicplus.com/ and https://www.revize.com/ with AI-native interfaces into city services, governments, economies etc... like a local AI-agent Economy managed by actual governing officials etc... but the admin is a separate product ATM.
https://codify.nyc is the one I am going to be launching first, hopefully in a few weeks. I only have 100 or so cities on board and live right now. They have been very useful in understanding all the mechanics and nuance of delivering services at the city/local level.
Your project looks interesting, let me know if you see any place we could work together.
> its: <city-name>.<country-iso2>.codify.city
> https://codify.nyc
Sorry for maybe misunderstanding, but isn't it supposed to be "new-york.us.codify.city" you're about to launch, given the other examples you've made? Wouldn't "codify.nyc" be the wrong way around?
At bottom, the Cincinnati, Ohio domainname URL now points to a "Site Not Found" page on Dreamhost^1
1. https://web.archive.org/web/20260513154601if_/https://nguyen...
Here is the /locality.html page
https://web.archive.org/web/20141217060926if_/http://nguyen....
It still (again?) loads for me.
Will WHOIS requests leak my address?
Nope. Even though you must supply your address in the registration form, a WHOIS request for your locality domain will only show information about the registrar.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding their statement but unless something recently changed this is not true. The .US TLD does not permit whois privacy services. The full legal name and address of the registrant will be shown in my experience and I could not find a registrar that would deviate from this.
Are they offering delegation of sub-domains of some domains they purchased perhaps? The example they gave did not suggest this if that is so. If that is the case then whois does not really apply unless they are giving different answers in their whois for sub-domains assuming their whois would be queried.
That is why I opted for .org for a small town that I operated not for official purposes as per the banner a website for in my spare time. When using a .US one can register it in the name of a company or the city can register it themselves through their own government to avoid a persons personal information being listed. Ensure auto-renew is enabled when assisting a city government as people come and go. Pay as far in advance for as many years as possible.
Maybe that’s only for registering primary domains and not subdomains?
Maybe that’s only for registering primary domains and not subdomains?
That is true and would explain my confusion on this matter if they have some list of apex domains they are dynamically creating sub-domains for. Honestly if this is the case I would avoid participating in this. This puts the control of the domain (sub-domain) in their hands for your city. Cities and states can already use sub-domains of their countries .gov domain structure which I realize is full of its own issues but that's another topic all together. Cities can also get citystate.gov in some states but I don't know how that process works.
This project would likely be shut down the first time someone complains to their government about one of the sites.
Seeing the list of contacts for delegated subdomains reminds me of a time when there were a lot more local ISP's. Inreach.com for Stockton, lodinet (possibly an ISP?) for Lodi..
But the one that really shocked me was https://www.snowcrest.com/mysc/ - which seems to still be up and running?? I wonder if the login page for webmail (ISP-provided email was a thing! And even hosting space!) still works.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090909141302/http://neustar.us...
Here in the Boston area, the first commercial ISP https://www.theworld.com/ appears to still be up and running, and is similarly frozen in time.
What a strange time machine.
The website offered to sell unlimited dialup for me, in Ohio, using a local phone number.
I Googled that number, and it appears that it may belong to another (related? different?) time machine: https://www.panix.com/dialup/
I worked at a tiny ISP in 2000. We had nationwide (maybe worldwide?) dialups through MegaPoP [1]; they would passthrough auth for user@dgx.net to our radius server, and charge us (IIRC) $5 for each user that successfully authenticated every month. I think we charged $10/month for local dialup only (where they called into our T1 modem bank) and $20/month for nationwide dialup... at least until our modem bank T1 failed and we couldn't get the telco to fix it so we just pushed everyone to the megapop numbers.
[1] I have no idea what they're called now. There's a huge chain of acquisitions. They may have stopped serving this market, but someone still is.
Neat! I didn't know how that worked. The little ISP I used to do some things for had physical POPs in different cities and AFAIK never went with Megapop or similar. Eventually, their POPs became all-in-one card cage devices that took a combination of PRI and T1 circuits and screwed them together with PPP, which seemed quite highly integrated to me at that time.
It does look like these may be Starnet/Megapop numbers, based on the panix.motd.megapop newsgroup mentioned on Panix's website. I did spend a minute trying to find who (if anyone) is steering the remaining dregs of Megapop, but I didn't make it very far.
Very curious if you would actually get a dialup number that worked if you filled out the paperwork. I guess probably not? But I have no idea.
I called a couple of them that were nearby and a modem answered.
I'm not interested in dialup data services at all at this point in 2026. I have no remaining means with which to use such a thing. The last cell phone I had that could act like a modem got retired in 2009 and the last time I had a dialtone in my house was 2010.
But if I had to guess, then I'd guess that these time machines are still operational.
What a blast from the past. I completely forgot that I was a The World customer way back when.
And now it's getting well stress tested
Maybe you should try one of the other numbers at https://www.snowcrest.com/dialup/numbers.php - most support v.92!
> 5. Date Operational......: You can use your birth date here.
Yikes, no!
why not?
It's a vector for identity theft.
Birthdays are one of the absolute worst kept secrets on the Internet. There are entire sites that blab that information to anyone who asks.
*.eu.org, was (is) an early attempt at something similar this side of the pond, starting in the early 2000s, also free although community managed, but still surviving. Used to be a good way to get a free "proper" domain delegation rather than a shitty iframe alias soon to become ad-ridden, or banner-ridden in those days should I say. Good for 1337 IPv6 hostnames for IRC as well.
Wonder if there is an equivalent to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch
And here I was thinking Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ouKNv7GN16I)
From Wikipedia: The name Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu translates roughly as "the summit where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, the slider, climber of mountains, the land-swallower who travelled about, played his kōauau (flute) to his loved one".
Just discovered that mission.sf.ca.us[0] already redirects to Noisebridge[1]
Of the "hackers" to get there before me, I'm happy it's them!
[0]http://mission.sf.ca.us
[1]https://www.noisebridge.net
unfortunately, whomever set that up didn't do it right. http to mission.sf.ca.us works, but if you do https, it's broken. The cert isn't for that, and if you ignore that, then you get sent to http://netisland.net/
Too bad it's not https://penisland.net/
I had one, registered I think in 1991, back in the uucp bang days. Had to give it up due to changes in requirements and IIRC Nustar being a real pain. Would like to get it back but no desire to jump through hoops to do so.
Anyone know why some larger cities are not listed? For example, I am noticing that Oakland, CA is missing. This would have been a major city in 1992 when the list was created as well.
Someone would have had to have signed up to administer the domain during the time that signups were available. In 1992, I think interest would have been pretty low in general. And once the internet became widely known, something.city.state.us domains were pretty unlikable. About the only thing they have going for them is the low low price of (usually) free.
That Neustar list is horribly outdated from 2009 and didn't list sf.ca.us and had scruz.net as the administrator for san-francisco.ca.us.
I checked www.whois.us and oakland.ca.us is administered by locality-support [at] about [dot] us
Try sending them an email?
That indicates that approval has been rolled up into GoDaddy at this point, and you’ll have to get a notarized letter from the city for them to issue you a domain.
Any idea who the current SF registrar is?
They have to want one.
Yeah I want to know how to get my local government to register themselves as one of these.
Remarkable, I had absolutely no idea I could do this in my state. I suspect this post is going to cause a spike in applications as folks like me discover we can have one for free.
Wish we had this option in Canada. This would be cool as heck.
Definitely keep in mind that right or wrong, these hosts are unusual as far as most commercial services are concerned and it can reveal annoying edge cases in their software.
eBay still in 2026 can't send to subdomains.
Use something like ebay@shipping.example.com and they send to ebay@example.com
I had to check the server logs to find why I wasn't receiving any mail and now need a top level alias just for eBay to handle their broken mail infrastructure.
I'm constantly annoyed how much trouble I have using a .health domain (looking at you T-Mobile). I can't imagine using this many subdomains off a .us.
True. I struggled to get signed up for my COVID vaccine back in 2021 because Walgreens wouldn't accept that my totally valid .rodeo email address could possibly exist.
I still use that domain for most corporate accounts. Currently, my wireless carrier refuses to believe I exist in some of their systems (but not others) because of it.
Fortunately, escalating complaints with large corporations with shitty practices is a hobby of mine.
Before you jump in, and because why not, there are also city-centric TLDs for purchase, with little oversight:
.nyc
.boston
.quebec
.miami
.vegas
I wonder how reliable this is. Will AWS lightsail continue to work indefinitely for free? What if AWS changes the system in some way? What if the person hosting my locality becomes unavailable?
I had one for a long time but the isp that was the local registrar is long defunct now
It is a bad idea to have any services come from your ISP that aren’t portable.
A few years back, I looked into registering a *.sf.ca.us locality domain and Sonic was the registrar back then.
Now, I'm trying to recreate how I found that, and I can't. But if anyone is interested, try: hostmaster [at] 50N1C [dot] net (spell sonic correctly).
whois sf.ca.us
For some reason, I was using ICANN's lookup (lookup.icann.org) which came up empty. But yes, a simple whois from the commandline gave me the right contact. Thanks!
Great instructions! Well, I'll follow up and let you know if Gainesville, FL responds!
Could I use Cloudflare's free nameservers instead of Amazon Lightsail?
Cloudflare only supports managing top level domains on the Free plan.
This is so awesome.
Can you setup wildcards? Like for example *.[name].san-fransisco.ca.us? That way I can do this once for my own name and have it setup for all future needs as well.
Yes. The registrar is for the root domain. You provide your own DNS. DNS can do wildcards for any root domain its delegated.
Interesting, claim is that:
MD BALTIMORE.MD.US. alby@uunet.uu.net
I am guessing that uunet email address is not going to go anywhere!
> FL HOTDOG.MIAMI.FL.US. arodriguez@houseit.com
I'm very confused by this entry. There isn't even a miami subdomain, just a Dade subdomain.
Delegation can happen at a dot, but does have to happen at each dot. The current referral sequence is:
root-servers.net -> cctld.us -> localitymanagement.us -> miami.fl.us
And it ends there with an NXDOMAIN. Unsurprisingly, a list archived in 2009[1] is no longer accurate. If I'm reading this Internet Monthly Report[2] correctly, that domain came into existence in October 1998.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20090909141302/http://neustar.us...
[2]: https://www.iana.org/archive/internet-monthly-reports/1998/i...
I wish there would be something like this in the UK but with county instead of state. E.g. swindon.wiltshire.uk or sheffield.southyorkshire.uk
I was hoping there would be something funny like twatt.worcs.uk or reading.berks.uk ... That aside, what would you do with such a domain? You could register x.uk with Nominet UK presumably. Just a small matter of the bill.
Buy the domain names then and offer those services.
The US state ones are just sub-domains. city.state.us isn’t a TLD.
someone has already registered all county.uk domains in 2019 :(
Aren’t there several states that have the same city name repeated within the state? I think there’d need to be a county delineator here too.
That gets extremely complicated. My town straddles the border between 2 counties. And you can't trivially have subdomains for counties and cities at the same level, because Wyoming has a Laramie city but it's in Albany County, not the neighboring Laramie County.
Did this just inspire the next "Falsehoods programmers believe about... Federalism"?
Virginia cities are independent, not within counties. And there's both a Fairfax City and Fairfax County. Making things even more confusing, the county seat is Fairfax City despite the city not being part of the county. The county has fairfaxcounty.gov while the city has fairfaxva.gov.
There are a handful of other independent cities in the US, but the vast majority are in Virginia.
St. Louis is like this as well.
If you have hierarchical naming, which DNS does, then the problem of name clashes is always a problem for whoever sits above those names and they can resolve it however they like.
If your state thought it was a good idea to have two cities named "Star City" that's on them to resolve however they like. Trial by endurance for the city mayor? Draw lots? Everybody in the state votes? Not my monkeys, not my circus.
Look-alike Unicode characters.
The edge cases always make things so difficult:
Manhattan: New York County
Brooklyn: Kings County
The Bronx: Bronx County
Queens: Queens County
Staten Island: Richmond County
All New York City. Same municipality, 5 counties.
There's also the edge case of the (unofficial) 6th borough of NYC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_borough
ny.ny.us
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82f7BB6zNOcYou're right, but typically, when two towns in a state share a name, only one is an incorporated city at most. The other, or both, are usually unincorporated communities. Normally, unincorporated communities do not receive a city.state.us locality domain.
For city.state.us, I'm pretty sure first to file (while filing was available) wins...
Ohio doesn't (or at least historically didn't) have a highlander restriction for incorporated cities.
Oakwood, Cuyahoga County was incorporated in 1951 although Oakwood, Montgomery County was incorporated in 1908. There's also an Oakwood in Paulding County, but its wikipedia page doesn't have an incorporation date or explicitly declare it incorporated or not. I thought there was a famous Ohio city with a same named city elsewhere, but I must have been thinking of somewhere else. I will note that Pennsylvania has an awful lot of same named Townships.
City name in the US ends up being a pretty wild concept when you dig into the details. Often what people are using as a 'city name' is really the name of their post office which statistically has a high correlation with the city they live in. But of course, lots of people live outside incorporated cities, and postal boundaries are independent of political boundaries.
ooh, this reminds me of Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses...
https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...
See also: http://nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us/locality.html
Edit: already linked in the article! That's what I get for not reading to the end!
Seems like the primary use for locality domains is to explain to others how to get locality domains.
This is really cool, but scrolling through the list I find it hilarious that the seventh largest city in the USA has no locality domain but small towns in my home state that I've never even heard of have one.
could be very powerful, how to validate
Bummer, looks like most of the ones in South Dakota are assigned to noc@sd.net, so presumably they can't be used, despite being reserved.
i wish this was in canada
Only reason for this is for spam and shit