The incumbent contractor and a new partnership are vying for who will administer Web addresses ending in “.us” for the U.S. government.
Sterling-based NeuStar Inc. has managed the .us domain under a six-year contract for the U.S. Department of Commerce. The department doesn’t pay the company to manage the domains, but NeuStar charges a fee of about $6 annually to each of the 1.2 million sites registered.
The Commerce Department is expected to announce which company will manage .us for the next three years sometime this month. NeuStar is vying against Ireland-based competitor Afilias, which oversees such domains as .org.
Afilias has formed a joint venture called Alliance Registry with Scottsdale, Ariz.-based domain registrar GoDaddy.com to bid on the contract.
NeuStar has failed to properly market .us, according to Alliance Registry Director Brian Cute, who compared it with such domains as .com, which has nearly 70 million sites, or Germany’s .de, which has four times as many users as .us.
“If you’ve had six years to grow this domain, these results kind of speak for themselves; it certainly would suggest a lack of marketing,” Cute said.
Alliance plans to cut the price of sites by 25 cents and scale up marketing efforts for .us, particularly to municipalities, which are some of the domain’s original users. U.S.-based companies, citizens and foreign firms with an American base can also register for the domain.
Keith Drazek, NeuStar’s senior manager for industry and government relations, said while other domains such as .com have been heavily marketed since the mid-1990s, .us wasn’t launched for public registration until 2002. He also said .us’s slower growth is not because of a lack of marketing, but because it has to meet stricter criteria than other domains — criteria that NeuStar endorses.
For example, addresses with .us cannot include offensive language, and users must provide more detailed registration information.
“NeuStar has committed to implement additional policies and procedures, which help to further increase the stability and reliability of the space, in conjunction with additional responsible marketing programs,” Drazek said.
