NeuStar today announced that it has been awarded the contract to operate and administer the .US Internet domain name registry. The official country-code top level domain (ccTLD) for the United States, .US is overseen by the United States Department of Commerce.

The original .US registry contract was awarded to NeuStar in June 2001, and is due to expire on October 25, 2007. The new contract term is for a base of three years beginning October 26, 2007, with the possibility of two one-year extensions.

NeuStar won the competitive .US procurement after the Department of Commerce conducted a careful, thorough, and objective evaluation of all proposals. Criteria for selection included bidders’ experience, track record, and ability to deliver operational performance, technological excellence, policy compliance, product innovation, and marketing. NeuStar was judged to be the best overall registry operator under these criteria.

“NeuStar is very pleased to retain operational and administrative responsibility for the .US domain, and we are honored that the Department of Commerce has placed its trust in us once again,” said Richard Tindal, vice president of domain name services at NeuStar. “This award is a validation of NeuStar’s exemplary performance and stewardship, and demonstrates the value that we provide to the government and to the industry. We are proud to remain in this important role.”

MARINA DEL REY, Calif.: The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will launch an evaluation of Internationalized Domain Names next week that will allow Internet users to test top-level domains in 11 languages.

“This evaluation represents ICANN’s most important step so far towards the full implementation of Internationalized Domain Names. This will be one of the biggest changes to the Internet since it was created,” said Dr Paul Twomey, ICANN’s President and CEO. “ICANN needs the assistance of users and application developers to make this evaluation a success. When the evaluation pages come online next week, we need everyone to get in there and see how the addresses display and see how links to IDNs work in their programs. In short, we need them to get in and push it to its limits.”

The evaluation is made possible by today’s insertion into the root of the 11 versions of .test, which means they are alongside other top-level domains like .net, .com, .info, .uk, and .de at the core of the Internet.

Next Monday, 15 October 2007, Internet users around the globe will be able to access wiki pages with the domain name example.test in 11 test languages — Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil.

The wikis will allow Internet users to establish their own subpages with their own names in their own language. The evaluation is being done in the 11 languages of the Internet communities that have shown the most interest in moving IDNs from concept to reality.

The full introduction of IDNs will mean that people can write the whole of a domain name in the characters used to write their own language. Presently you can only use these characters before the dot, so .com, .net, .org and the like can only be written in characters from basic Latin. IDNs will change this so that literally tens of thousands of characters will be available to the world.

“Right now only the ASCII characters a through z are available for use in top level labels — the part of the address after the dot,” Dr Twomey added. “Users will be able to have their name in their language for their Internet when full IDN implementation makes available tens of thousands of characters from the languages of world.”

More information on the IDN program is available at: http://icann.org/topics/idn/

Links to the wikis will be available on ICANN’s website starting 15 October 2007.

Source: Press Release

My blogging break has been taking longer than expected. I recently moved to another town, which is quite remote, and my service provider seems to have some problems with getting a stable Internet connection setup at my new residence. But they promised to have it all up and running by next week, so I hope for the best.

In the meantime, you should read Ron Jackson’s new cover story about Kevin Vo and Ammar Kubba at DNJournal.com. They’re successful entrepreneurs who run the innovative domain parking company TrafficZ. Their success story is quite a worthwhile read.

Article URL: http://www.dnjournal.com/cover/2007/october.htm