The free .city.state.us domain almost nobody uses

In 1985 the United States delegated the Internet's first country-code top-level domain, and four decades later fewer than thirteen thousand people have ever claimed the free, place-based address it still hands out.

A namespace built like a postal map

The .us top-level domain was created on February 15, 1985, making it the Internet's first country-code top-level domain ever delegated. Its original administrator was Jon Postel of the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California, the same engineer who managed the early Internet's address authority. Working with his colleague Ann Cooper, Postel codified the .us policy in RFC 1480, published in June 1993.

What RFC 1480 set down looked nothing like the commercial naming conventions that came to dominate the web. The second level inside .us was reserved for two-letter U.S. Postal Service state codes, producing extensions like .ca.us, .ny.us, and .wa.us. Inside each state, the namespace was carved into localities, where a locality could be a city, a town, a county, or a recognised local place name appearing in a well-known atlas. The canonical format for a locality domain became organization-name dot locality dot state dot us, and the Fred Chan guide published in 2025 still uses the same shape, frederick.seattle.wa.us.

The hierarchy went further. RFC 1480 reserved ci.locality.state.us for city governments, co.locality.state.us for county governments, town.locality.state.us for towns, twp.locality.state.us for townships, and vil.locality.state.us for villages. Parallel to those, every state got organisational branches: k12.state.us for school districts, cc.state.us for community colleges, lib.state.us for public libraries, mus.state.us for museums, and gen.state.us for general independent entities. As Fred Chan writes in his 2025 guide, "Locality domains were first created in 1992, and the infrastructure has been maintained under government contract ever since."

The 2002 freeze that stranded the locality space

Stewardship of .us has moved several times since Postel's era. On October 1, 1998, the National Science Foundation transferred oversight of the domain to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Postel died later that October. Technical operation passed to ISI, then in December 2000 to Network Solutions, then on October 26, 2001 to Neustar under a fresh registry contract.

The decisive moment for the locality namespace came on April 24, 2002, when the second level of .us, names like vote.us, was opened to direct commercial registration for the first time. A few days later, on May 3, 2002, the domain icio.us was registered and would go on to anchor the bookmarking service del.icio.us. The same 2002 policy update made a quieter choice that still shapes the system today. As an NTIA description of the change puts it, "A moratorium was placed on additional delegations of locality-based namespaces, and Neustar became the default delegate for undelegated localities."

The contract changed hands again after that. Neustar's deal was renewed in 2007, 2014, and 2019, the last one running for ten years. In the second quarter of 2020, GoDaddy acquired Neustar's registry business. The .us registry operator in 2026 is Registry Services LLC, a GoDaddy subsidiary, working under the same 2019 contract.

What the numbers actually show

The clearest public snapshot of the locality space comes from NTIA records released for October 31, 2013. On that date the locality namespace contained 12,979 registered domains in total. Of those, 3,653 were managed by roughly 1,300 delegated managers across the country, and 9,326 sat under Neustar as the default delegate, which is to say, unclaimed by any local manager at all.

A 2013 NTIA survey of 539 delegated managers gives a sense of who actually runs these registries on the ground. Among the respondents, 282 were state or local government agencies, 98 were private individuals, and 85 were commercial Internet service providers. The same survey turned up the most striking fact about pricing in the locality space. As the NTIA report summarised, "Nearly 90 percent of the respondents offer domain registrations for free."

Compare that with the modern .us registry overall. As of December 2023 the entire .us top-level domain held 2,053,374 registered names. The locality slice is a rounding error inside that total, a tiny pocket left over from a policy regime the rest of the namespace moved past more than two decades ago.

How a registration still works in 2026

The mechanics are still on the books, and the Fred Chan guide walks through them in detail. To register a locality domain today the applicant must be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident, a U.S.-incorporated organisation, or an organisation with a bona fide U.S. presence engaged in lawful activity. The registration form is the Interim .US Domain Template version 2.0, descended from the 1990s nic.us paperwork. Applicants must run their own authoritative nameservers before the locality manager will accept the registration at all.

Chan's guide lays out five concrete steps. Pick the locality. Stand up nameservers on Amazon Lightsail. Fill out the Interim .US Domain Template. Mail the completed form to the locality registrar. Then wait days, or possibly weeks, for a manual response. There is no console, no instant checkout, no dashboard. The pipe is paper, email, and human review.

The Neustar moratorium adds a second filter that is easy to miss. Locality domains still sitting undelegated are restricted by current Neustar policy to local government agencies, which narrows the pool an individual can apply to. In practice, the realistic path for a private applicant runs through one of the localities that already has an active delegated manager willing to take outside registrations.

A working artifact

Fred Chan's own example sits inside that narrow path. frederick.seattle.wa.us redirects to fredchan.org and is operated under Seattle's delegated registrar, NuOz Corporation. The address resolves the way every other domain on the public Internet resolves. It just took paperwork and patience to get there.

What survives, then, is a contradiction. The United States runs a free, place-based public namespace, codified in 1993, technically open to qualifying residents for over thirty years, and largely empty. The locality space is not broken, and it is not being shut down. It functions exactly as it was built to function, as a quiet, manual, paper-driven artifact of an Internet that thought it would mirror a postal map rather than a corporate index. The forms still arrive. The slots are still mostly open. The system is still running.

Sources

• Fred Chan, Setting up a free *.city.state.us locality domain (2025): https://fredchan.org/blog/locality-domains-guide/
• RFC 1480, The US Domain (June 1993): https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1480
• Wikipedia, .us TLD: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.us
• About.US, Locality Structure: https://www.about.us/locality-structure
• Hacker News discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48122635