Two million domains to transition from GoDaddy Registry to Identity Digital.
[This story has been updated with a statement from Identity Digital and terms of the contract.]
Top level domain name company Identity Digital has won the U.S. government contract to operate the country’s .us domain name.
Identity Digital will take over for GoDaddy (NYSE: GDDY), which inherited the contract when it acquired Neustar’s registry business.
This is a blow to GoDaddy. With about two million domains and a wholesale price of $6.50 per year, it’s about $13 million in lost revenue. That’s not a lot for the company, but it’s high-margin revenue. (First-year .us registrations are often offered at lower prices, so the total revenue number might be lower.)
GoDaddy lost the contract for .co last year, and that weighed on its revenue. .Co is a much more expensive top level domain, however.
Identity Digital operates hundreds of top level domains, including some country code domains. It manages the backend for Anguilla’s popular .ai extension and also has the contract for .au (thanks to its Afilias acquisition). It also runs .io, a popular extension for tech companies.
The original proposed terms of the government’s request for proposals would have excluded both Identity Digital and GoDaddy from bidding because they own domain registrars. The terms were later changed. A restriction that the registry be U.S.-based and have experience with a large registry limited the pool of contractors.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) originally hoped to name a winner by April, but delayed it multiple times.
In a release today, the NTIA said:
NTIA will work with Identity Digital to elevate the usTLD to a gold standard, best-in-class country code Top Level Domain that demonstrates American innovation, leadership, and service on behalf of its registrants.
In a statement, Identity Digital CEO Akram Atallah said:
We are pleased the U.S. government selected Identity Digital to help run .us. We committed to strengthening multistakeholder governance and bringing innovation to .us, and this selection affirms the strength of our registry services business. Registry operators around the world rely on our platform, and we now bring those services to .us. Our priority now is a smooth handoff. We will plan the move of .us to our systems in close coordination with NTIA, and our registrar and channel partners.
The government doesn’t pay Identity Digital directly but allows the company to collect annual fees from registrars for each .us domain registered.
The contract runs for 36 months, including a transition period of up to nine months. This is followed by option periods that could extend the contract to seven years.
An NTIA spokesperson told Domain Name Wire that further information (such as wholesale pricing) will be announced later.
So basically the prices will go up and the zone files will become unavailable. Oh great!
The contract requires zone files. I have asked the NTIA about pricing.
The great unpatriotic, un-American, anti-American scandal of .US >
I was there for the 2002 release.
.US was released to the general public practically under a rock, almost even in stealth as it were, and this was by design.
Despite that any normal person would think and expect the opposite. Most especially, absurdly and ironically then, since when it was released in 2002, our country was in the midst of probably the greatest awakening and reawakening of American patriotism and patriotic fervor since at least WW2.
The “powers that be” and puppet masters who run the people who run the government give the orders, and the registries and others simply do what they’re told and what’s expected of them.
And ever since then, public awareness and interest in .us has been successfully also kept under a rock, also so easily since the art and science involved has been developed and honed into child’s play over the years, decades and centuries.
“Do the American people even know or care that the .us domain TLD exists?” Do an AI search like that. AI can be surprisingly blunt sometimes, such as “Most people in the United States do not know or care about the .us domain extension, treating it as an afterthought compared to the ubiquitous .com.”
Why is this the case?
No one should even have to ask that by now anymore, but unfortunately in certain contexts it may still be far too often necessary.
And for those who are still successfully kept within “the matrix,” of which there are sadly still so many, it’s because .US represented, and still potentially represents, a whole new vast frontier of possible, probable, and perhaps almost certain loss of control over the hearts and minds of the public to steer, manipulate and use at will, because of how .US could and doubtless would be (and would have been) used to publish and communicate truth and real journalism vs. fake and controlled, to address the profound evils, corruption and destruction of both our society and even the world at large.
And that’s just putting it briefly and mildly. .US represented and still represents a “threat” to the profoundly evil and diabolical status quo, and the vast untold billions, trillions, and time spent and invested in creating, preserving and expanding it.
It’s been a while, by the way, a long while, but last I checked a website like “RepresentUs” at Represent.us for example was doing a very interesting and seemingly good job of trying to realize something like the good opposed by the above, despite the vast mountain of resistance. Don’t know what they’re up to now.
The ugly realities of the above are also why the American public has been denied the basic right and access to simple, normal, and nearly otherwise ubiquitous whois privacy. Whenever any “official” reason has been stated or suggested in the media for that farce in the matter, it is clearly the same old/same old lying and hypocrisy of pretext for such evil. Each passing year only makes the hypocrisy and absurdity of it worse.
There was a period of time in recent years when some part of the public was starting to notice the existence of .us more. Can’t have that. You could discover that in search data. The massive phenomenon of Zoom.us appeared to have a lot to do with it. But sure enough, that was killed as well. If you were inclined to bet, how much would you want to bet what was done to Zoom.us, which then led to it being subordinated to the .com, and the “Zoom.us” phenomenon being practically vaporized and decimated, was deliberate and a simple case of doing what is told, or one or more controlled insiders doing what the assignment was, etc. I’m confident one could probably safely bet a lot.
God will judge everything and this entire world in the end when it’s all over. None of it will last or win in the end. One could say a lot more about that, perhaps another time.