.US Locality Compliance Report

The usTLD has expanded its breath and recognition to rank among the 20 largest domain spaces in the Internet. This was made possible only by the expansion of the domain to allow second-level registrations and moving the management of the entire namespace - the existing locality space and the expanded space - to a highly available, near-real time registration system.

The names within the locality space represent some of the most important public resources to Americans today. It is the naming structure adopted by most public schools, state and local government's to provide valuable resource materials to its citizenry, many of the public libraries of the United States, and acts a domain space for the North American Indian Nations.

Due to the history of it's creation by Jon Postel (as summarized in Section 2) and its highly distributed nature, each of these namespaces has numerous points of contact, the "delegated managers", at various nodes in the DNS. This presents a challenge in identifying and contacting the "delegated managers and adequately cataloguing all of their registrations and responsibilities. Subsequently, each node within the usTLD has only a minimum base of consistent standards.

Articles B.4 and C.1 of Purchase Order No. SB1335-02-W-0175 (pdf), require that Neustar, as the exclusive Registry Operator for the usTLD "conduct an investigation (or commission such an investigation) and submit a report . . . evaluating the compliance of existing sub-domain managers with the requirements of RFC 1480 and other documented usTLD policies." See Page 7. In addition, Neustar must "recommend structural, procedural, or policy changes designed to enhance such compliance and increase the value of the locality-based structure to local communities." See Page 10.

This report summaries the creation and structure of the locality space of usTLD, summarizes its usage, and documents the study undertaken by Neustar to determine this information. Although the locality space is fairly well developed, there are a number of action items detailed in this report that need to be taken in order to increase the functionality and utility of the locality space. These include:

• The development and introduction of a Lame Delegation Policy;
• Centralized and automated Whois registrations and updates;
• Policies and procedures (including any relevant fees) for new delegations, cancellation of delegations and re-delegations, and;
• Instituting a standard agreement between the usTLD Administrator and delegated managers.

Neustar, as the current administrator of the usTLD, will address these by proposing mechanisms to the United States Department of Commerce to implement the recommendations contained within this report.

Download the report (pdf)