The draft RFP includes provisions that severely limit the pool of potential operators.
In December, the U.S. government published a draft RFP to operate the .us country code domain and requested feedback.
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) planned to open the RFP in early 2026 and announce the winner this month. However, it has yet to open the RFP.
I wonder if that’s because restrictions in the draft RFP meant no bidders could win.
The draft RFP had a few requirements that would seem to eliminate potential bidders:
- Must be a U.S. company
- Must have managed a namespace with two million + domains
- Cannot own a registrar selling .us domains
Let’s unpack these.
The requirement that the registry be based in the U.S. and have managed a large registry has two impacts.
First, I believe there are only three registries that currently meet these qualifications: GoDaddy Registry, Identity Digital, and VeriSign.
Second, the two-million requirement means no new registries could be formed to respond to the RFP.
So there are three possible registry operators, and two of them have an issue with the third point: they cannot own a registrar selling .us domains.
This technically eliminates both GoDaddy and Identity Digital (which owns name.com).
GoDaddy Registry currently runs the top level domain despite selling domains through its registrar. I believe this is a function of the contract originally being granted to Neustar, which GoDaddy later acquired.
That said, this is a valuable registry contract that might encourage the registries to stop selling .us domains through their registrars. With a current wholesale fee of $6.50 and 2.4 million registered .us domains, that equals about $15 million in annual fees. (The number might be less if the registry provides rebates or first-year discounts.)
If I were GoDaddy or Identity Digital, I’d propose ceasing the sale of .us domains on their registrars, but maintaining existing registrations. They might even propose offloading their existing .us registrations to another registrar. Another option is to propose a minimum price that the registrar will charge, above current market prices.
With GoDaddy and Identity Digital technically disqualified, that leaves VeriSign.
VeriSign has an optics problem. $6.50 is well below the current (and likely rising soon) $10.26 it charges for .com. What would it look like if it proposed charging less to manage the .us namespace? It would make it harder to justify the cost of .com domains. The profit from running .us isn’t worth the risk to .com.
(I also suspect opening the .us contract up to proposals could result in a lower wholesale cost than the current one.)
I wouldn’t be surprised if the delay in opening the RFP is due to the realities I’ve outlined. At a minimum, I suspect NTIA will have to make some provision for the registry to be affiliated with a registrar that offers .us domains.
I think you forgot one: PIR
PIR doesn’t have its own registry backend, it uses Identity Digital for its TLDs
.US has been deliberately suppressed by design from the beginning. The American public still scarcely knows it even exists, and cares even less – by design. I was also there in April 2002.
Yes, I’m high IQ John who just commented yesterday under Elliot’s “Don’t Let AI Overprice Your Domain Name” post at DomainInvesting.com, the one who is now >99% only an end user vs. domainer, and was once briefly even a fed, as in federal officer. Yes I’m that John.
The refusal to allow basic normal whois privacy has always been part of that suppression, aside from being so blatantly and plainly un-American, anti-American, and so forth.
The reason why .US has been so suppressed from the beginning is now more plain and blatant than ever before to anyone who knows anything about what’s been going on in our world, and the multitude who have been waking up to that to this day. Even I was not nearly as “out of the Matrix” in April 2002 as I am now, but even then it was so clear how .us was being deliberately released “under a rock” as it were.
It also doesn’t matter whether it’s Republicans or Democrats in charge, left, right, liberal, conservative, and so forth – the “uniparty.” Those who know anything about anything now also know that’s part of the fraud – the fake divide and conquer left/right divide.
While many in our industry (yes I’m still a member nonetheless) may still be deceived into thinking that horizontal framework is the real conflict in our country and society, the puppet masters and “powers that be” can no longer fully control the great enlightenment away from it, and they certainly know it.
Stop the deplorable, reprehensible, dishonest, un-American, anti-American and beyond absurd prohibition on whois privacy for American citizens and businesses with .us.