GoDaddy and Identity Digital will now be eligible to bid on contract.
Today, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) issued a Request for Proposals for the administration of the .us top level domain.
The government originally planned to open the RFP in January and announce a winner this month, but delayed the RFP release until today.
Under a new timeline, initial submissions are due May 18. At that point, the NTIA will let applicants know whether they’ve passed the first hurdle, and will give them until June 8 to submit additional documents. The government will award the contract on June 30.
Earlier this month, I wrote that the original RFP would apparently exclude all potential bidders because they couldn’t own a domain registrar that sold .us domains.
The updated document includes a carve-out that will allow registry affiliates to operate a .us registrar, subject to certain safeguards. This means GoDaddy and Identity Digital, which own domain name registrars, can now qualify.
The RFP still requires the contractor to be in the United States. Many potential bidders asked for details on this requirement. The NTIA reiterated that it must be an American company and said foreign majority ownership of the contractor is prohibited.
There is some wiggle room that could open this up slightly. For example, the .org registry, Public Interest Registry (PIR), manages a top level domain that meets the requirements. However, it outsources the backend technical registry to Identity Digital, which will certainly bid on the RFP. Perhaps PIR could partner with a different backend registry for a bid, and that registry could move the required operations to the United States.
Another change in the RFP is the addition of language requiring bidders to “Include information about free speech safeguards to protect registrants’ First Amendment rights.” That was likely added to appease certain political interests.
.Us is currently managed by GoDaddy’s registry arm. It inherited the contract when it acquired Neustar’s domain registry business.
This is a positive development.
But the 2 million-domain rule is hard to understand. It’s interesting NTIA already had to revise its draft approach after the ownership rule seemed to leave Verisign as the only real bidder. That raises a basic question: how much thought did NTIA really put into this procurement from the start? A bidding process is supposed to open the field, not narrow it so much that the outcome looks obvious before it begins.
The real question should be simple: can the company run .us safely and reliably? Can it meet the government’s standards for security, uptime, backup, continuity, and compliance? That matters much more than whether it already runs a registry of about the same size. The .gov procurement process in mid-2022 proves the point. The government used a competitive bidding process and chose Cloudflare on the merits, and transitioned its operation away from Verisign, the old operator. If that worked for .gov, why does .us need a rule that may shut out strong competitors before the bidding even starts.
There are hundreds of U.S. tech companies with deep experience running very large databases, global networks, and critical internet systems. Cloudflare, Oracle, Google, AWS, Microsoft, IBM, and Akamai are obvious examples. Some of these companies likely have even more experience than the traditional registry operators when it comes to managing very large databases and highly reliable infrastructure. Amazon and Google already operate registries. NTIA should focus on real capabilities, not an arbitrary cutoff that seems designed mainly to shrink the field before the competition starts.
John – are you for real, or are you just unaware, out of touch or hoodwinked, as sadly so many are, or do you have an agenda there perhaps?
I am definitely not this first John commenting here. I also have a background in IT, by the way, just a fairly diverse kind of guy as they say. Especially including data and databases.
So to address what you have said here, John, some of those entities you’ve mentioned are most exceedingly famous and well-known already, by anyone who knows anything about what’s going on now and what our country and the world is facing, for a great commitment to and great deal of practice of un-American anti-American censorship. And no, not just on their own, but of course in partnership with, you guessed it, our great gov itself. And more. It’s bad enough we have to be concerned about that possibility with Go Daddy, but some of the ones you mentioned make Go Daddy look like a civil liberties organization by comparison.
As in – enemies of Free Speech, the First Amendment, the biggest and most important foundation under God to freedom, liberty and the state of the public in this country and the world.
So while to the uninformed and unaware your statement sure sounds sensible, reasonable, etc., the truth and what’s at stake is very different.
Sad how another famous industry blog put it this way today:
“Shrinking .us TLD is up for grabs” and:
“the domain is currently on a fairly steep downward trajectory in terms of registrations.”
And as I wrote in the previous .US thread here at the beginning of the month:
.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.