The state needs another $2 million to fully transition to a .gov domain name.
The Colorado Sun posted an interesting look at Colorado’s government switching from a .us domain to colorado.gov.
Many states are making this switch, and the article explains the perceived benefits of using a .gov domain.
The state considers using its existing state.co.us domain a “serious security risk” because of phishing. Anyone can register a .us domain, and they could register one similar to what the state uses.
It’s also difficult for state officials to register for federal briefings because these require an email ending in .gov.
Some Colorado state agencies have already shifted to .gov, but the governor’s office thinks it needs another $2 million to fully transition. I don’t know how much it has paid to date, but it seems like a low number to make all the necessary changes. I guess governments aren’t too concerned about perfect SEO transitions that a private company needs to worry about.
That might actually be a low estimate. Need to think about hard costs like signage, business card re-printing, forms, etc, PLUS revising across decades of old links and resources that may have had URLs codified or preserved in records, and gracefully transitioning them. Even just to do a preparation for what to plan, it requires a rather large inventory of use, and that definitely has costs.
Something noteworthy and important other than just this price tag debate on the change from a legacy Colorado change.
There is a long standing myth that domains are interchangeble, and ‘just move to another domain’ gets trivialized rather heavily reductive messaging when heavy price or policy changes come forth.
Another, interesting rhtetorical ‘hmmmm’ question… Is there some form of move to reclaim .co.us so it could be purposed in alignment with how many other ccTLDs register domain names in the future?
Good grief, I didn’t realize there was so much involved.
If the state of Colorado thinks coloradosos.gov will not be subject to phishing attempts, they are delusional. What a horrible syntax! Thankfully, .US, and .GOV, are NOT subject to the incompetence, corruption, capture of ICANN, nor its inept, lengthy policy-making processes, so both of these TLDs can more quickly innovate, maintain and improve, domain integrity, stability, resilience, and security, including registrant identity, use or misuse, of second-level and sub-domains in their respective TLDs (.US is a ccTLD and .GOV, a legacy gTLD, wisely, at the insistence of the US government, has no registry agreement with ICANN). ICANN is a FAILED organization and untrustworthy, and has proven to be UNFIT for the mission it was given by the US government. If the US government would re-assert its historic stewardship over all 7 legacy gTLDs, including .COM (see RFC 1591), it would lead to a vast improvement of the global internet for users, registrants, and registrars alike!