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.us

Top-level Internet domain for the United States

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Logo of .us, the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the United States
Registry Services, LLC · Public domain

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The us domain is less commonly used by American businesses and enterprises than the internationally more common .com.

History

On February 15, 1985, us was created as the Internet's first ccTLD. Its original administrator was Jon Postel of the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California (USC). He administered us under a subcontract that the ISI and USC had from SRI International (which held the us and the gTLD contract with the United States Department of Defense) and later Network Solutions (which held the us and the gTLD contract with the National Science Foundation).

Postel and his colleague Ann Westine Cooper codified the us ccTLD's policies in December 1992 as RFC 1386 and revised them the following June in RFC 1480. Registrants could only register third-level domains or higher in a geographic and organizational hierarchy. From June 1993 to June 1997, Postel delegated the vast majority of the geographic subdomains under us to various public and private entities. us registrants could register with the delegated manager for the specific zone they wished to register in, but not directly with the us administrator. In July 1997, Postel instituted a "50/500 rule" that limited each delegated manager to 500 localities maximum, 50 in a given state.

In June 1998, Postel raised the possibility of covering IANA operating costs by charging locality name registrars, who would pass the costs along to individual registrants. In September 1998, the United States Postal Service proposed funding the operations in order to assume control of us, as part of a plan to diversify away from postage revenue. On October 1, 1998, the NSF transferred oversight of the us domain to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) of the United States Department of Commerce. Postel died that month, leaving his domain administration responsibilities with ISI. In December 2000, these responsibilities were transferred to Network Solutions, which had recently been acquired by Verisign.

On October 26, 2001, Neustar was awarded the contract to administer us. On April 24, 2002, second-level domains under us became available for registration. One of the first us domain hacks, icio.us, was registered on May 3, 2002, for the creation of the subdomain del.icio.us. A moratorium was placed on additional delegations of locality-based namespaces, and Neustar became the default delegate for undelegated localities. Neustar's contract was renewed by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) in 2007, 2014, and most recently in 2019 for a term of 10 years.

On March 31, 2019, the us registry made it clear that under its Acceptable Use Policy it would not allow the sale of opioids through the us top level domain.

In Q2 2020, GoDaddy acquired Neustar's registry business.

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Source and licence. Adapted from the Wikipedia article “.us” (this version, 2026-08-24) by its contributors, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Lablypedia has left out its tables, references and most pictures, and linked it to other Lablypedia articles.