Having a domain under the .us TLD once seemed appealing to me for practical reasons: It's short, consistently inexpensive, and hasn't already sold the vast majority of its useful namespace to squatters.
Unfortunately, it forbids WHOIS privacy services, which makes it a privacy and security hazard for personal domains. Pity, that.
People running WHOIS against kylesmith.com might discover that it's owned by someone named Kyle Smith.
I'll actually offer my take: domain names under the US TLD are a shared, public good, and no one should be allowed to anonymously own a shared, public good.
There's almost no real privacy online in the US. When I search for my name my phone number and almost every address I've ever lived at it is publicly retrievable - on multiple sites. Even with a private WHOIS I get spam from various companies via my registrar asking to speak to me about making a website.
You can get some of the major sources to remove you with a service like Optery [0]. Costs a few bucks, but if you let them work at it a few months you can drop the subscription and the effects will linger for a while before you start finding yourself on public databases again.
I used it myself and I have trouble finding information about myself, even with my inside knowledge. If someone is determined enough you probably can't really hide from them, especially if they have any connections to law enforcement or one of the big data sinks. But you can definitely make it harder for casuals.
Eventually I hope other states like Oregon will get that, since they tend to copy California legislation. But in the meantime, I will pay a few bucks, because while it may be a failure of the government, I cannot wave a magic wand and fix that. But I can make the data itself go away for awhile.
What kind of spam is that? All my info is available online, but I don't really get much spam. Of course, I get spam to my email but my email address is everywhere (also by design) so that's no wonder.
Its caller spam, this subthread is about a shared American experience of receiving spam calls to our cellphones all day in such volume that many of us route all calls to voicemail automatically.
I think you're misinterpreting it as an obsession over privacy. We are victims of unscrupulous scam caller spam due to a multi tiered failure in how our government implements public utilities, and in the meantime we are chiseling at solutions such as enforcing rules on the data brokers who have our information for lease.
Which seems to be working, for people that pay for services to solve this problem. And California's government is simply doing that same service for free for its residents.
The one I do find interesting, is how the concept of "privacy" has changed in the internet realm.
It wasn't all that long ago I could look up anybody in my town (or any town really) in a big book, and get contact details for them. Unless they specifically opt-out.
But now that concept is seen as madness.
Now companies no longer even list phone numbers or e-mail addresses on their own websites!
Might help with phone numbers, but addresses are trivial to find and cannot be removed, if you own property in the United States. Every county publishes property records, searchable by name. Unless you own your house with an LLC, if someone knows or can guess the state you live in, they can 1) search on the property records website of the top 10 counties by population, and if that fails 2) expand to searching other counties until you pop up. Not sure how to mitigate this, other than the LLC method.
There are still many thousands of three-letter domains for (third-party) sale on .com/net/org though. Sedo.com lists a handful of .net domains that are under $100. Most are more than that though.
I had a domain that I was just using for e-mail, just to catch everything and not link directly to me. Then lent the A record to host an archive of something, which got linked around a load of places. So had "SEO Value" suddenly.
Did the same, the renewal failed because the card had expired, and now squatters have been sat on it, probably getting all my spam and resetting my credentials on random websites for the last 10 years.
Lesson for everyone else reading this is to not let your domains lapese. You can also pay ahead (up to 10 years for most registries) so there really is no excuse - and that tends to provide some protection from price hikes as well, or at least give you more time to react.
can't say .expert that its popular by any measure but I have https://use.expert
In my opinion, there are still some really great short domains available. I actually even know some but don't have the budget to buy them.
The thing with domains is also that they aren't one time, I mean I am happy paying for domains which are 20$ say once even (and this comes as someone frugal but I just love domains) but most of these domains cost quite a lot.
For example use.expert would cost me around 40-50$ per year. I mean its 3-4$ per month so I am happy with it but still, my point is that I absolutely know more domains which I wish to buy but it would just be an hassle long term. I can probably sell them at cheap auctions to recoup the price but it just doesn't feel that worth it to me but overall, yeah.
.expert is a "new" TLD meaning that the operator can do more or less whatever they want and is not bound to the same ICANN rules as the gTLD operator(s) are. IMO nuTLDs are not appropriate for anything except joke sites.
> For example use.expert would cost me around 40-50$ per year. I mean its 3-4$ per month so I am happy with it but still, my point is that I absolutely know more domains which I wish to buy but it would just be an hassle long term. I can probably sell them at cheap auctions to recoup the price but it just doesn't feel that worth it to me but overall, yeah.
Well yes, that's exactly why we unfortunately need to pay rent for domains - otherwise speculators would just buy them all up even more than they already do.
Nope. Even though you must supply your address in the registration form, a WHOIS request for your locality domain will only show information about the registrar.
This is definitely not true for general .us domains.
I registered one a year or two ago. And assuming my normal default Whois privacy was being applied (I clicked through too fast. Wasn’t paying attention)
I noticed my mistake after the spam bots started hitting me up for their web design products.
That was clearly not true for domains directly under .us when I last read their rules, roughly a year ago.
I suppose it might be true for .city.state.us subdomains, but those fail my first criterion (they're not short), and are themselves a privacy hazard since they substantially narrow the search space for personal info about the domain owner. So it doesn't refute my criticism.
> you can literally write anything in the whois though
It's still fraud though. And there are multiple ways that might trigger an investigation into the validity of your contact info, such as abuse reports, court cases or failing to renew. Some people with axes to grind have been known to get domains of people they don't like taken down just by complaining to the registrar.
Unfortunately, it forbids WHOIS privacy services, which makes it a privacy and security hazard for personal domains. Pity, that.