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.US is the United States'
country code for domain names. It has been active for years, but under-utilized for
a variety of reasons. Recently, the U.S. government has re-delegated management of the domain to Neustar, a private company that will attempt to aggressively expand the domain.
As with any domain expansion,
.US may pose trademark infringement and/or brand dilution problems for
companies. To protect brand owners, Neustar's "Sunrise Period" allows owners of
a U.S. trademark registration or pending application filed prior to
August of 2001 to apply for an exact version of their trademark. After
expiration of the Sunrise Period, anyone can register a .US domain name on a
first-come, first-served basis.
US Sunrise
Procedure
The sunrise procedure for
trademark owners is not complex and can be completed through a registrar, but there
are some rules that need to be followed. For example, you may only
apply for a domain name that exactly matches your applicable trademark (with
special rules for punctuation and special characters). In addition, a
random selection process will be conducted for multiple owners of the
same trademark. More information on rules and procedures is available
at www.nic.us.
We have investigated the various
registrars offering .US Sunrise applications (not all ICANN registrars are participating, Verisign being a notable exception). The least
expensive provider is Encirca, located at www.encirca.com, which is charging
$90 for the mandatory five-year registration.
Note that .US was previously a
locality-based system under which names were structured as
follows: amazon.seattle.wa.us or axiom.nyc.ny.us. Under the new system, you
can obtain a name directly under the second level domain, e.g.
amazon.us. or axiom.us.
The Sunrise Period filing
deadline is April 9.
If you have any questions about
the Sunrise
process, please contact Marty Schwimmer at mschwimmer@axiomlegal.net.
Important Note: You may have
read recently
that the Federal Trade Commission has enjoined sales by a domain
name
company selling .USA names. These are so-called alternate root
names and
are not approved by the domain name regulatory body, ICANN, and do
not
universally resolve (operate). .US is an ICANN approved top-level
domain,
and the names do universally
resolve. | 
