New .us domain names available next week

The first step in the U.S. government's re-launch of its top-level domain - .us - begins Monday, when companies can start registering their trademarked names with the .us suffix.

This so-called sunrise period will last until April 9, after which anyone can buy a .us name from the 35 domain name registrars that have signed up to sell them.

The U.S. Commerce Department selected NeuStar, the Washington, D.C. telephone numbering database operator, to run the .us registry last fall. NeuStar also operates the .biz registry through a joint venture with Melbourne IT called NeuLevel.

NeuStar hopes to take advantage of the rise in patriotism following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks with the sale of .us names. Target markets include companies doing business in the U.S., state and local government agencies and individuals.

Even prior to Sept. 11, focus groups showed that "there was very strong sentiments in having an American identity online for businesses, individuals, government agencies and philanthropic organizations," says Robert Poulin, senior vice president of registry services at NeuStar.

Each country has its own top-level domain, which is operated outside the direct supervision of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the international governing body that oversees names with .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info and .name suffixes.

Until now, the U.S. government has issued less than 100,000 .us names, and those primarily went to state and local government agencies. The names weren't very popular because they were locality-based and had long, hard-to-remember strings of text separated by dots. The New York Metropolitan Transit Authority, for example, recently replaced its original .us domain name - mta.nyc.ny.us - with the snappier mta.info and promptly grew its Web site traffic more than 10-fold.

With its re-launch of .us, NeuStar will make short, memorable .us names available to any organization or person that does business in the U.S. or has a U.S. presence. Multinational corporations like IBM, for example, will now be able to purchase ibm.us as a Web location for promotions to American consumers.

For large companies with dozens or hundreds of trademarks to protect, NeuStar is offering simplified registrations that ensure names will be operational in less than 15 minutes. NeuStar also has adopted a dispute resolution process similar to ICANN's process for resolving conflicts over .com, .net and .org names.

NeuStar will charge registrars $11 per name for a two-year registration. Retail prices are expected to be in the $15 to $30 range.

The U.S. Commerce Department selected NeuStar to operate the .us registry from a field of more than a dozen bidders, including Verisign, Register.com, Telcordia, Computer Sciences and SRI International's Sarnoff subsidiary.