out-of-business registrar

Joe Greco jgreco at ns.sol.net
Wed Sep 28 19:42:24 UTC 2005


> On Wed, 2005-09-28 at 13:12 -0500, /dev/rob0 wrote:
> > On Tuesday 2005-September-27 21:55, mmccaws2 wrote:
> > > we have a client who's domain registrar has gone out of business.
> > > i-theta.com was the registrar.  Does anyone know what happens to

Oh, god (or maybe oh, good) the domain squatters are out of business.
Well, I think there was someone else doing that too, but I don't recall
who.

i-theta (aka us-domains.com), as I recall, began registering huge numbers
of locality names in the mid '90's, which caused quite some concern 
because it appeared that they were going to try to start charging folks
for the privilege of registering under their own locality.

I will disclose at this point that we're the ones supporting mil.wi.us 
and milwaukee.wi.us, one of the oldest .US geo domains, and we do so on
a purely voluntary no-fee basis...

I had actually started to compile a list of unregistered localities in
our area in order to register them here and prevent this kind of thing, 
but fortunately the 50/500 rule came out right about that time and spared
us the headache.

> > > abandoned domains, as in are they acquired by other registrars.  If
> > > so, how do I go about finding who has acquired the domain.  Or does
> > > my customer just find another registrar? The domain in question is
> > > ci.woodinville.wa.us.
> > 
> > That's a special use domain. Your customer (the city of Woodinville, 
> > Washington USA) always and exclusively owns that domain. 

While that is technically true, the domain in question is actually
"woodinville.wa.us", with "ci" being a delegation.  "ci" is a special
use domain (along with "co", etc) and may only be delegated to the City
of Woodinville.  However, the delegation of "woodinville.wa.us" itself
may be made to any suitable supporting registrar.  I believe that one 
of the current guidelines is that the registrar for the zone in question
must be approved by the city.

Note that a "registrar" in this context does not need to be a company
that is in the business of running a registry for .com/.net/etc.  It may
be a local ISP, the city's IT department, or any other reasonable party
who is interested in and capable of running the show.

> >  Start poking 
> > around Neustar (the .US TLD registrar) and find out how to proceed. 
> > This is not a commercial/private domain so the advice in the other 
> > thread is not appropriate.
> 
> That may be but I believe you are very wrong about .us being special
> use. See http://www.neustar.com/addressing/usDom.cfm 

Neustar took over .us a few years ago, with (I believe) a motive of 
dismantling RFC1480 geographic naming and using .us as just another 
top-level domain (which they could then profit from selling domain
names in).

There are indeed special use aspects to .us, most of which are described
in RFC1480.

> As to changing registrars, this link should help the OP
> http://www.neustar.us/register/index.html

OP:  Good luck getting Neustar to help you out with your .US geo domain.
Despite having obvious ties and control over our zones here for a decade,
they made me go through a huge song and dance of getting letters from the
CIO of the City of Milwaukee in order to *remove* a *clearly dead* name
server.  If I recall correctly, this took about three months and several
rounds of B.S. to get corrected, and from what I hear, that's doing real
good.

I feel certain that they want the .US geo names dead, gone, and inoperable,
because they're not making any money from them.  Their level of support for
the delegated managers seems to reflect that, and they've essentially
halted any attempts at new registrations, etc.

I would suggest that you be prepared to be broken for a little while.
Sorry.  :-(

... JG
-- 
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.



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