I have three locality domains, all with different registrars in Oregon. Two are with unique delegated locality domain registrars (think old school consultancies or ISPs that still exist) and one directly via localitymanagement.us (GoDaddy/USTLD).

One of the registrars is from an out of state operator that has been dead for three years. I tracked his widow down and had a number of cordial conversations over about 18 months. I've helped his widow renew some personal domains but she's recently told me that she's going to stop paying the hosting bill of the locality registrar and it'll shut down June 1st. I've offered to take over hosting, we'll see if she is convinced.

Several other locality users will likely also see their domains disappear once that happens as the USTLD registrar will require a notarized letter from the city/county of that domain to approve any "new" (new in their system) domains. Not easy for any mid or large sized city in the US.

I love locality domains clearly, but the bureaucracy applied since the start has piled up over the years.

I do worry that this poor Seattle ISP is going to get DDoS'ed by outsider (find an appropriate locality please if you go down this route) due to the popularity of this article, though!

RIP Jon.

• 1vuio0pswjnm7

  last Wednesday at 7:01 PM

  "RIP Jon."

  In the 90s when learning about the internet I remember reading stuff written by "Jon Postel", a univeristy employee in California

  Today, a curious student trying to learn about the internet would probably end up reading stuff written by "Big Tech" and/or academics who have financial relationships with these or other so-called "tech" companies

  I remember Postel and one other person, perhaps at SRI, I forget her name, had a plan for these sort of hierarchical geographical domainnames. I recall it was _not_ commercial in nature. It "seemed like" Postel saw the internet, including DNS, as a public service. Needless to say, any such non-commercial vision was not realised

  ICANN DNS became a money grab

  If Postel had survived to today, would he have sold out like so many of his peers

  I like to pretend he would not but I have no idea

  • 1vuio0pswjnm7

    yesterday at 4:41 AM

    I believe the document I'm thinking of may have been RFC 1480

    https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1480.txt

    If so, the other person was Ann W Cooper

    AFAIK Cooper was never at SRI, but Postel was at one time

    Putting aside the inaccurate memory, the point I wish to make as an ordinary computer user reading about the internet is that Postel wrote about the internet as a _public resource_. Check out the tone of this random Postel RFC, for example

    https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1591.txt

    Postel received a PhD in Computer Science in 1974 from UCLA and, apparently, he was a _two-finger typist_ who preferred handwritten slides over PowerPoint and used monochrome logos instead of color (I find this interesting; I'm not suggesting anyone else would)

    Joyce K Reynolds, who co-authored some of the most important RFCs with Postel on protocols, was a social sciences major (another factoid I find interesting)

  • car

    last Wednesday at 8:41 PM

    The hierarchical geographical domains you are remembering must have been the 2000 '.geo' Top Level Domain (TLD) proposal from SRI. It didn't work out, but I remember thinking at the time that it was a cool idea.

    It would have provided geographical information based on a domain encoded grid, not for human but machine consumption (e.g. acme.2e5n.10e30n.geo).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.geo

    In a similar vein there is the 'e164.arpa' domain for mapping telephone numbers.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number_mapping

  • donmcronald

    last Wednesday at 7:08 PM

    > ICANN DNS became a money grab

    It’s too bad more people don’t understand how the domain industry is structured under ICANN. IMO, the registries are ICANN’s customers, the registrants are part of the product being sold, and the registrars are a liability shield.

    One day there will be a grab for .com.

    • Barbing

      last Wednesday at 7:31 PM

      Fun fact (you probably remember), you used to report phishing sites with one simple email and they would actually be taken down.

      These days I get the feeling a lot of the registrars are essentially/effectively in on it (at least by inaction). A well-run ICANN feels needed, who can track takedown compliance.

      • marysol5

        today at 8:39 AM

        looking at you Cloudflare

        Funnily enough years ago I did a takedown request for terrorist material, realised that the host was in the same building as me. So when the ticket got closed and they didn't make any changes. I walked into their office and showed them a lovely video they had on their network.

        Suddenly they took action.

      • donmcronald

        last Wednesday at 8:17 PM

        Abuse handling is a mess. AFAIK, the registries, registrars, and ICANN all share responsibility in terms of mitigation. There’s no consistency.

      • ocdtrekkie

        last Wednesday at 10:46 PM

        The entire domain squatting/parking industry exists because filing an ICANN dispute costs more than paying the squatter. Absolutely insane.

    • CalRobert

      yesterday at 4:57 AM

      It’s a protection racket too. When they first launched generic tld’s, donuts(a shady registry) had a product that didn’t allow domain registration but -did- block registration of a domain across all tlds in case you didn’t want to pay for company-name.[200+ tlds]

    • icedchai

      last Wednesday at 8:14 PM

      I still remember when they started charging for domains. Until late 1995, they were free.

    • arjie

      last Wednesday at 8:35 PM

      In hindsight, quite lucky it’s a California non profit. That allowed us to stop the dot-org sale.

• fullstop

  last Wednesday at 5:47 PM

  I used to have some domains registered with "theparsec.com", and would communicate with the owner, "ML", on occasion. It was great, he was responsive and helped me out if an order didn't go through for some reason.

  In 2022, their TLS certificates were off -- a subdomain used by a backend redirect process was no longer valid, so I contacted "ML" and they were unresponsive. I managed to get my domains to a new register by ignoring some TLS warnings and transferring them. As of July of 2022, I have not heard from "ML" and I assume that he passed away. I don't know their identity or what became of them. All I know is that their name is/was Mark.

  • mikeyouse

    last Wednesday at 6:47 PM

    The internet is weirdly good for creeping on people with this level of detail —

    https://nationalpublicdata.com/people/l/mark-lord/nv/reno/pd...

    Looks like you can reach him at mark84@gmail if you want to say ‘hi’.

    • fullstop

      last Wednesday at 7:37 PM

      I did some more creeping, but this is probably the end for me if he doesn't get back to my email. He was involved with real estate, but their realty webpage is offline and the last record in the Internet Archive is from 2018. That's the last time I heard from him as well. My original comment was incorrect -- that's the last time I interacted with his service.

      I wonder if the whole thing was on auto-pilot until things eventually broke.

    • fullstop

      last Wednesday at 6:58 PM

      I had found that person, and thought that it could be him. The site that I used did not provide an email address, though. Even the link that you provided shows other addresses than that to me.

      • mikeyouse

        last Wednesday at 7:14 PM

        Yeah it’s weird how they obfuscate some and surface different emails - this one seems to have both in normal and incognito mode: https://www.fastpeoplesearch.com/mark-lord_id_G-414558371175...

        • fullstop

          last Wednesday at 7:23 PM

          It's probably an attempt to maximize search hits. I wonder if they would always be provided if your user-agent matched google's webcrawler UA.

          The last email address in your link, the sbcglobal one, is for someone else entirely. She's involved in the church in Springfield, IL. I assume that she got tied in by Mark's surname.

• bombcar

  last Wednesday at 4:59 PM

  The notarized letter may be easier to get than you think - if you live in the city/county. The key is being professional, polite, and present.

  • Kneecaps07

    yesterday at 12:22 PM

    I don't understand why getting a letter notarized is being treated as some huge ordeal. Pretty much any bank or credit union has a notary on staff. It takes 5 minutes. Many lawyers and accountants are notaries. Many people here probably know someone who is a notary and they don't even realize it.

    • yesterday at 6:38 PM

• tiffanyh

  last Wednesday at 8:00 PM

  Super interesting.

  Naive question, what do you use the locality domain for?

Unfortunately the author is correct that you’re pretty screwed if the locality is no longer delegated. I messaged GoDaddy to register one in Boston, they asked for a _notarized_ letter on the local governments letter head approving. No one within the Boston city government knew what their procedure would be, and those willing to say yes didn’t have a notary around. They ended up citing a state law indicating that no locality domains were to be used for _government_ purposes in MA as their reason to say no, when of course that has no bearing on private use…

If anyone would like to band together to push city of Boston or Cambridge to start approving these, please let me know! I can revive some email chains.

• Spooky23

  yesterday at 1:34 AM

  That law was a reaction to a Federal thing (through CISA i think) to migrate all governments to the .gov domain in the US in the name of security and branding.

  They were pushing it hard when DNSSEC was being babbled about by cyber people.

  • philipwhiuk

    yesterday at 10:20 AM

    To be honest migrating government infrastructure to .gov makes it much easier to at least get some minimal handle on the extent of critical governmental infrastructure.

    • Spooky23

      yesterday at 10:50 AM

      Totally agree, not a bad idea at all. Some local governments aligned their web presence around the tourism and chamber of commerce type organizations, which made it confusing for people to know where they had to pay their water bill vs. get tourism info.

• sometalk

  yesterday at 11:31 AM

  I am not sure I understand. Are you saying boston.ma.us and cambridge.ma.us are no longer delegated? A whois record on both of the subdomains tells me there is a registrar for it. Either ways, I am happy to band together if it makes a difference.

  • nickswalker

    yesterday at 3:55 PM

    I only have first hand experience with boston.ma.us and seattle.wa.us, and might have some of the terminology wrong but:

    * Originally, anyone could ask to take responsibility for a locality, and serve as the registrar for it. Individuals and small ISPs did this en masse.

    * Many decades have passed, many went out of business or became derelict in their obligation to administer their delegated subdomain.

    * When this occurs, the responsibility rolled back up to top level registrar which today is GoDaddy (used to be Nuestar until they got bought). GoDaddy's policy is that they'll only give out a subdomain registration on a locality if you show them a notarized letter from the locality's government saying you can have it. They will _not_ delegate the whole locality back to a local entity to set up a process.

    * No one in local government will furnish this letter, because it's logistically inconvenient ("no notary in our office") and there's no official policy on how to handle the requests ("all I can find is this state law that says we can't"). My representative declined, and even talking with the tech people in City of Boston only went in circles. I may have been the first person to ask, and they'd probably rather I registered an .e.g. .boston and left them alone.

    Meanwhile for Seattle, the small ISP that manages the locality TLD is alive and well and will hook you up within the week for free. I registered http://rcr.seattle.wa.us/ while talking to the Boston IT people as a small demonstration that other similar localities have functioning ecosystems around the TLD, to no avail.

  • nickswalker

    yesterday at 4:08 PM

    My proposed way of breaking the logjam with city of Boston has two prongs:

    1. Have several independent people simultaneously and persistently asking for a letter allowing them to have a subdomain. Provide social proof that at least a few people want the city to provide this service.

    2. Obtain a letter from another MA locality which is more willing/able, to be able to show the city that its possible within state rules. I was planning to give it a go with Cambridge.

    I am happy to forward my correspondence with the city to you or anyone interested in giving it a go. You can find my email address if you look.

    • sometalk

      yesterday at 9:58 PM

      I live in Cambridge and have been tangentially involved with city hall on volunteer basis. I am happy to ask there or one of the amenable councilors.

      • nickswalker

        yesterday at 11:14 PM

        That would be great. Please let us know how it goes

• yesterday at 12:16 PM

• chimeracoder

  yesterday at 1:06 AM

  > They ended up citing a state law indicating that no locality domains were to be used for _government_ purposes in MA as their reason to say no, when of course that has no bearing on private use… > If anyone would like to band together to push city of Boston or Cambridge to start approving these, please let me know! I can revive some email chains.

  I'm confused by this. Some have migrated away from the locality domains but some are still in use even by official/state purposes.

  Here's the website for the Newton, MA public schools: https://www.newton.k12.ma.us/

  Belmont: https://www.belmont.k12.ma.us/

  I believe Cambridge used to use one as well but I can't confirm that.

  • nickswalker

    yesterday at 4:32 PM

    Yes, I believe the state policy says no _new_ government use of .us locality subdomains, but old uses might be disruptive to remove and may remain: https://www.mass.gov/policy-advisory/website-domain-policy

    It's frustrating that I can point to https://www.foxharp.boston.ma.us as evidence of private use of .boston.ma.us and still be brushed off.

This list of (supposedly 7388, didn't realize there even were that many?) of them can apparently now be registered online replacing the email method in the OP: https://localitymanagement.us/registrar/domain/delegatedzone...

edit -- seems like the server has been "slashdotted" by this thread, I was finally able to get an account created but can't log in. doesn't seem very well coded anyway since I was apparently able to change the password twice using the same activation link lol.

• chickensong

  last Wednesday at 6:57 PM

  Amazing slow site. If it does manage to find a valid domain, it doesn't show any contact info, nor registration form. Do I need to create an account and log in to see those?

• morpheuskafka

  yesterday at 8:16 AM

  Seems like the company has now suspended newly created accounts and disabled signups... aren't they being paid or required on some kind of government contract to manage this system?

• shishcat

  yesterday at 1:44 PM

  To approve domain name registration requests, supporting documentation must include a Notarized Letter of Approval from the requesting Locality signed

  says this if you try to get it from localitymanagement.us

• dawnerd

  yesterday at 4:54 AM

  I tried to go through that site earlier today but they wanted a notarized letter from the city gov which, yeah, that's not going to happen.

• russellbeattie

  last Wednesday at 8:51 PM

  > "Slashdotted"

  Here's a nickel, kid. Get yourself a better computer.

  • fred_is_fred

    yesterday at 3:08 AM

    Preferably a beowulf cluster of them.

• mfkp

  last Wednesday at 11:42 PM

  Now it's showing "self registration is currently disabled, please contact customer support"

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.

• anonu

  last Wednesday at 5:27 PM

  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.

  • rootusrootus

    last Wednesday at 5:59 PM

    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.

    [0] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/optery

    • yieldcrv

      last Wednesday at 10:20 PM

      I just can't get myself to pay for this problem that's ultimately a failure of the government and relies on another corporation behaving with my data

      fortunately I'm a California resident so looks like that government has passed a solution that's free, thanks for sharing that guys

      • tuwtuwtuwtuw

        yesterday at 6:11 AM

        Here in sweden, personal data such as name, address, income, birth date, personal number, car ownership, etc. is public by design.

        I find it interesting how the view on this differs depending on country and what people are used to.

        • marysol5

          today at 8:43 AM

          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!

        • yieldcrv

          yesterday at 2:39 PM

          The issue is the spam

          All of our personal identification data is available, not by design, but it is available

          • tuwtuwtuwtuw

            yesterday at 3:50 PM

            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.

            • yieldcrv

              yesterday at 4:16 PM

              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.

              • tuwtuwtuwtuw

                yesterday at 5:50 PM

                I see. Didn't know it was legal to call people like that in the US, so I misunderstood.

  • marysol5

    today at 8:41 AM

    "And now a segue to our sponsor, offering a service utterly unique to the USA"

  • ZeWaka

    last Wednesday at 5:42 PM

    It's worth sitting down for an hour and filing a bunch of information redaction requests.

    • edot

      last Wednesday at 11:12 PM

      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.

    • EduardoBautista

      last Wednesday at 5:55 PM

      There are services that will submit this information to hundreds of sites for you.

      I used incogni and it seemed to have a positive result.

      https://incogni.com/

      • bragr

        last Wednesday at 6:58 PM

        Or if you're in California: https://privacy.ca.gov/drop/

        • Barbing

          last Wednesday at 7:34 PM

          Thank you! How’d you find out about this?

          • bragr

            last Wednesday at 8:30 PM

            It was in the news when it went into effect at the beginning of the year.

• KPGv2

  yesterday at 2:24 AM

  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.

• NetMageSCW

  last Wednesday at 9:25 PM

  Yes, I have a 3 letter .us domain that I’ve had for a while. Hard to get a three letter domain in any other popular TLD.

  • ranger_danger

    last Wednesday at 10:11 PM

    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.

    • foresto

      last Wednesday at 11:22 PM

      > for (third-party) sale

      Many of us find it unethical to give money to scalpers.

      > a handful of .net domains that are under $100

      And this is why.

      • coxley

        yesterday at 12:21 PM

        Yeah... my .com renewal lapsed due to an expired credit card, and it was snatched before I realized it. They've always wanted $2k for it.

        Even if I was OK paying in principle, that's too much for a personal blog that gets one post every 4 years.

        • marysol5

          today at 8:49 AM

          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.

  • Imustaskforhelp

    last Wednesday at 11:27 PM

    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.

• hungryhobbit

  last Wednesday at 5:26 PM

  From TFA:

  Will WHOIS requests leak my address?

  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.

  • xahrepap

    last Wednesday at 5:39 PM

    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.

  • foresto

    last Wednesday at 5:35 PM

    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.

  • lftl

    last Wednesday at 5:34 PM

    Hrmm... I just tried this from my personal .us domain I've had for 23 years and it shows all my info.

• yieldcrv

  last Wednesday at 6:14 PM

  you can literally write anything in the whois though

  registrars have forwarded me ICANN notices about having info verification for 10 years and nothing happened

  nothingburger

  • marysol5

    today at 8:54 AM

    I have a .EU domain, of which I'm no longer eligible thanks to Brexit, but the WHOIS is just some junk to make it "valid".

  • majorchord

    yesterday at 12:15 AM

    "you can literally drive as fast as you want on the highway"

  • ranger_danger

    yesterday at 12:13 AM

    > 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.

  • foresto

    last Wednesday at 6:41 PM

    Good luck in your gamble.

    • righthand

      last Wednesday at 7:02 PM

      ICE getting 4th jobs enforcing WHOIS registration data soon.

  • reaperducer

    last Wednesday at 9:38 PM

    you can literally write anything in the whois though

    Can confirm.

    I have a domain that's had outdated whois information since 2006. Nobody cares.

    Even when it was up to date, it never got any spam, I suspect because the contact information was in a country that wasn't valuable to spammers.

Seeing the *.k12.oh.us in the delegated subdomains brought me back to highschool. When I was little I always wondered why the city name was before k12. Didn't know it was structured like that everywhere.

• anamexis

  last Wednesday at 4:04 PM

  School districts are often supersets of municipalities.

  • runjake

    last Wednesday at 4:06 PM

    This is the correct answer.

    From RFC 1386, Section 3.3.1:

      "Public schools are usually organized by districts 
      which can be larger or smaller than a city or county."
    

    https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1386#page-12

    • throw_await

      last Wednesday at 4:40 PM

      What a wierd phrasing. It reads to me like it excludes the possibility of it being the same.

      • thesuitonym

        yesterday at 2:30 PM

        It's said this way because the default assumption is that a school district extends only to city or county lines. They can be larger or smaller, though.

      • staticshock

        last Wednesday at 4:55 PM

        "can be" ≠ "must be"

        • pbhjpbhj

          last Wednesday at 5:10 PM

          "can be" is used to list all possible values, which is where the confusion arises. It sounds like: ∀x, x>C v x<C.

          "Might be", I think would be better.

          • wavemode

            last Wednesday at 5:29 PM

            "can" can be a synonym for "might" / "may"

            (purists would argue that it can't, but common usage trumps purism)

            Also, I will point out that, even from the perspective of formal logic, the original statement has "city or county". In other words there is no single fixed C - C could be a city or a country. Since counties can be larger than cities, it stands to reason that a school district could be larger than the size of a city while being equal to the size of a county. And can be smaller than the size of a county while being equal to the size of a city.

            So, even assuming that the original statement is taken to have the logical meaning you've interpreted, that meaning does not technically forbid school districts from being equal to the size of a county (as long as that county is larger than some city, so that we can still make the true statement "this district is larger than a city"), nor from being equal to the size of a city (as long as that city is smaller than some county, so that we can still make the true statement "this district is smaller than a county").

          • dsr_

            last Wednesday at 9:41 PM

            MAY is the correct choice.

            https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2119

            • anamexis

              last Wednesday at 11:01 PM

              This is not in the context of a requirement level. The definition of MAY as defined there makes no sense here.

• EvanAnderson

  last Wednesday at 4:42 PM

  I managed a couple ".k12.oh.us" domains back in the day. The employees hated the domain in their email addresses, but I found it very logical. I saw all kinds screwed-up addresses in bounce messages forwarded to my company address when "can't email people in the District" tickets got sent my way (a lot of "districtname.oh.k12.us", etc). I guess it wasn't so simple for "normies".

  One of the schools ended up using a ".com" domain that was one character longer than their ".k12.oh.us" domain but easier to tell people verbally (I guess).

  I also managed a "co._countyname_.oh.us" domain, too. Again, universal hatred for the domain in email addresses, and again I found it logical and reasonable.

  The County government ended-up getting a ".gov" domain that was 5 characters longer than their "co._countyname_.oh.us" domain and, in my opinion, hell to tell people verbally ("It's Countyname County Ohio dot Gov. Yes-- all one word. The words County and Ohio are spelled out. No, not O-H-- Ohio is spelled out." >sigh<)

  • bombcar

    last Wednesday at 5:01 PM

    I'm still mildly annoyed every time usps.gov redirects me to usps.com

  • Xirdus

    last Wednesday at 5:10 PM

    Once you stop thinking of domain as an addressing tool and start thinking of them as branding, the complaints will make sense. "Dot k12 dot oh dot us" is a terrible brand name.

    • EvanAnderson

      last Wednesday at 5:15 PM

      I have a hard time with public dollars going to "branding" but I do recognize it's a concern for some people and I'm a vastly minority opinion.

      • Xirdus

        last Wednesday at 6:12 PM

        Everything needs branding. "United States of America" and "USA" is branding. Good branding makes people's lives easier and (on average) a tiny bit happier. That has some impact on quality of life. Spending a few tax dollars on improving people's QOL is a good thing if you ask me.

        As a specific example, imagine how many less people would enroll in Medicare if instead it was called Lifelong Assistance in Meeting Medical Needs of Aging Able-Bodied Population. Just finding eligibility criteria and the correct forms to submit would be 10 times harder.

        (I think it would be even better if Medicare and Medicaid weren't so similar and easy to confuse with one another. Recently I had to explain both concepts to an immigrant who knew about neither but found contradictory information online about both.)

      • Atotalnoob

        last Wednesday at 5:50 PM

        Public dollars or not, it IS branding.

        Having a strong, consistent, easy to use name IS a positive.

        It’s easy to remember, which means more “engagement”. For a local government organization, that means more support, more feedback, and the constituents are “getting their moneys worth” more than a government organization that they can’t ever interact with.

        It’s a clear win for using your dollars BETTER

      • ericjmorey

        last Wednesday at 9:31 PM

        Why would you have a problem with public dollars being used for effective communication?

  • TMWNN

    last Wednesday at 7:41 PM

    .gov should never have been expanded to outside the US federal government.

    (.com should never have been expanded to outside US-headquartered companies, either.)

    • thesuitonym

      yesterday at 2:43 PM

      I'm actually in favor of it, because it makes it much more clear what is a government address, versus what is a private address in the US. But .gov should have been broken up into .state.gov address so you could very easily guess the address of your local governments website. Like why is the site for Los Angeles lacity.gov and not losangeles.ca.gov? Why is the Ohio secretary of state not sos.oh.gov? These should all be well known address, so if I move to a new state, I can just go to the web site, and do whatever registration I need to without having to hunt for these addresses.

    • NetMageSCW

      last Wednesday at 9:28 PM

      The second is hard to justify unless you are willing to say .com should have been replaced with .com.us

    • hed

      last Wednesday at 8:55 PM

      Agreed on both.

• bentcorner

  yesterday at 2:43 PM

  My local school district somehow has <schooldistrict>.us

  Not sure how that came about.

• MithrilTuxedo

  last Wednesday at 4:09 PM

  mayo.k12.sc.us was my high school. It seems a shame they're not still using it.

• reaperducer

  last Wednesday at 9:43 PM

  Seeing the .k12.oh.us in the delegated subdomains brought me back to highschool.*

  When I was in my wandering days before there were search engines, I would always enter http://travel.state.*st*.us, or http://travel.*st*.us to look up tourism web sites.

  It was unusual for a city or state to not have a travel.city.state.us, or travel.state.us domain.

• T3RMINATED

  last Wednesday at 3:46 PM

  Our school and town dropped all the .mi.us domains and they have their own domains now, why would they do that? I know it used to be k12 too.

  • xp84

    last Wednesday at 4:32 PM

    They nearly all did that because the average person never figured out how the DNS hierarchy worked, and many of them never even got comfortable with the idea of having more than one dot in a domain (with the exception of a “www.” prefix). So it was easier for each district to just make up a random .com or .org.

    • bombcar

      last Wednesday at 5:04 PM

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CsN6rbonMo is basically perfectly accurate

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gNFFZpIDU8 (we need .egg and .muffin)

In Germany it is possible to register an ENUM domain for a phone number. This provides a DNS mapping from the E164 number to DNS records, e.g. for IP phones, etc.

Decentralized and under user control, no shitty silos like FaceTime, WhatsApp.

ENUM stands for “Telephone Number Mapping.” It is essentially a bridge between the world of telecommunications and the Internet. With a single ENUM domain, you can combine all your contact options under your familiar phone number:

https://www.denic.de/en/products/enum-domains/

• last Wednesday at 10:59 PM

• zajio1am

  yesterday at 10:42 AM

  The main point of ENUM was compatibility with open SIP, unfortunately that never really happened and most SIP operators do not accept incoming calls from public internet (and do not route outgoing calls based on ENUM).

• wowczarek

  yesterday at 2:34 AM

  Sadly ENUM is dead or buried or both for many countries.

• captn3m0

  last Wednesday at 9:04 PM

  I saw this lets you do Fax over IP. Any other advantages or usecases?

  • car

    last Wednesday at 9:24 PM

    I don't know if this gets much personal use, seems real cumbersome.

    But this is of huge interest to carriers, since it allows them to skip the PSTN/peering cost when the callee endpoint is an IP phone.

    There is private ENUM for carrier use I recall, not sure what the current status is, with LTE/VoLTE, RCS etc.pp.

    http://dam3d3.free.fr/PFE/Pathfinder/GSMA_PathFinder_WebSite...

    Here the list of countries that have ENUM delegated for their country code.

    https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/inr/enum/Pages/delegations.aspx

  • DonHopkins

    yesterday at 1:58 AM

    Time travel.

Some similarities to *.<lastname>.name -- one of which is that the Public Suffix List thinks you're part of a single site with others you have no control over. Another is the weird registration procedure, but this one is weirder!

• dextercd

  last Wednesday at 6:47 PM

  Apparently VeriSign plans to discontinue .name: https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/consensus-policies/rsep-2...

  • cormorant

    last Wednesday at 7:20 PM

    > and existing third level domain names will be terminated

    Wow! The risks of being esoteric

• last Wednesday at 4:31 PM

I want to set one up now and use it to call out the city board members taking kickbacks from flock.

• pugworthy

  last Wednesday at 3:57 PM

  This is probably not the kind of approach to taking out new domain names you should encourage. A lot of other causes might think this is their way to set up an "official" representation of their strongly held political beliefs, and I think you can imagine where that might go with some groups.

  • vasco

    last Wednesday at 4:09 PM

    "Don't use your free speech because other people might use theirs in ways you don't like"

• prepend

  last Wednesday at 4:04 PM

  Why would city board members care what your domain name is?

  • dawnerd

    last Wednesday at 4:13 PM

    Oh they probably don't. But it might annoy them slightly if the foia docs were hosted there.

    • toast0

      last Wednesday at 5:12 PM

      My city already has to publicly list and host foia requests and host documents provided, if they were provided electronically. Most of the requests are for permit drawings, which are provided on paper to the local reprographics company and are not digitized, but most of the potentially annoying requests result in a pdf that's publicly available from a portal linked by the city. Not sure why it would be annoying, even in the slightest, to have it also available somewhere else.

• davidu

  yesterday at 4:58 PM

  This is assuredly not happening.

*.eu.org, was (is) an early attempt at something similar this side of the pond, starting in the early 2000s, also free although community managed, but still surviving. Used to be a good way to get a free "proper" domain delegation rather than a shitty iframe alias soon to become ad-ridden, or banner-ridden in those days should I say. Good for 1337 IPv6 hostnames for IRC as well.

Will WHOIS requests leak my address?

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.

Perhaps I am misunderstanding their statement but unless something recently changed this is not true. The .US TLD does not permit whois privacy services. The full legal name and address of the registrant will be shown in my experience and I could not find a registrar that would deviate from this.

Are they offering delegation of sub-domains of some domains they purchased perhaps? The example they gave did not suggest this if that is so. If that is the case then whois does not really apply unless they are giving different answers in their whois for sub-domains assuming their whois would be queried.

That is why I opted for .org for a small town that I operated not for official purposes as per the banner a website for in my spare time. When using a .US one can register it in the name of a company or the city can register it themselves through their own government to avoid a persons personal information being listed. Ensure auto-renew is enabled when assisting a city government as people come and go. Pay as far in advance for as many years as possible.

• DrewADesign

  last Wednesday at 4:24 PM

  Maybe that’s only for registering primary domains and not subdomains?

  • Bender

    last Wednesday at 4:27 PM

    Maybe that’s only for registering primary domains and not subdomains?

    That is true and would explain my confusion on this matter if they have some list of apex domains they are dynamically creating sub-domains for. Honestly if this is the case I would avoid participating in this. This puts the control of the domain (sub-domain) in their hands for your city. Cities and states can already use sub-domains of their countries .gov domain structure which I realize is full of its own issues but that's another topic all together. Cities can also get citystate.gov in some states but I don't know how that process works.

    This project would likely be shut down the first time someone complains to their government about one of the sites.

    • DrewADesign

      yesterday at 1:59 PM

      It definitely doesn’t seem like a very stable initiative. Benign neglect for a project nobody in government thought enough about to bother cancelling when they didn’t want to do it anymore.

Just discovered that mission.sf.ca.us[0] already redirects to Noisebridge[1]

Of the "hackers" to get there before me, I'm happy it's them!

[0]http://mission.sf.ca.us

[1]https://www.noisebridge.net

• fragmede

  last Wednesday at 6:29 PM

  unfortunately, whomever set that up didn't do it right. http to mission.sf.ca.us works, but if you do https, it's broken. The cert isn't for that, and if you ignore that, then you get sent to http://netisland.net/

  • DonHopkins

    yesterday at 2:01 AM

    Too bad it's not https://penisland.net/

Seeing the list of contacts for delegated subdomains reminds me of a time when there were a lot more local ISP's. Inreach.com for Stockton, lodinet (possibly an ISP?) for Lodi..

But the one that really shocked me was https://www.snowcrest.com/mysc/ - which seems to still be up and running?? I wonder if the login page for webmail (ISP-provided email was a thing! And even hosting space!) still works.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090909141302/http://neustar.us...

• nstory

  last Wednesday at 4:28 PM

  Here in the Boston area, the first commercial ISP https://www.theworld.com/ appears to still be up and running, and is similarly frozen in time.

  • ssl-3

    last Wednesday at 4:50 PM

    What a strange time machine.

    The website offered to sell unlimited dialup for me, in Ohio, using a local phone number.

    I Googled that number, and it appears that it may belong to another (related? different?) time machine: https://www.panix.com/dialup/

    • marysol5

      today at 9:00 AM

      I worked at an MSP managing a tiny one-man ISP that still had dial-up customers in 2017...

    • toast0

      last Wednesday at 5:03 PM

      I worked at a tiny ISP in 2000. We had nationwide (maybe worldwide?) dialups through MegaPoP [1]; they would passthrough auth for user@dgx.net to our radius server, and charge us (IIRC) $5 for each user that successfully authenticated every month. I think we charged $10/month for local dialup only (where they called into our T1 modem bank) and $20/month for nationwide dialup... at least until our modem bank T1 failed and we couldn't get the telco to fix it so we just pushed everyone to the megapop numbers.

      [1] I have no idea what they're called now. There's a huge chain of acquisitions. They may have stopped serving this market, but someone still is.

      • ssl-3

        last Wednesday at 5:36 PM

        Neat! I didn't know how that worked. The little ISP I used to do some things for had physical POPs in different cities and AFAIK never went with Megapop or similar. Eventually, their POPs became all-in-one card cage devices that took a combination of PRI and T1 circuits and screwed them together with PPP, which seemed quite highly integrated to me at that time.

        It does look like these may be Starnet/Megapop numbers, based on the panix.motd.megapop newsgroup mentioned on Panix's website. I did spend a minute trying to find who (if anyone) is steering the remaining dregs of Megapop, but I didn't make it very far.

    • jrochkind1

      last Wednesday at 9:54 PM

      Very curious if you would actually get a dialup number that worked if you filled out the paperwork. I guess probably not? But I have no idea.

      • ssl-3

        yesterday at 12:07 AM

        I called a couple of them that were nearby and a modem answered.

        I'm not interested in dialup data services at all at this point in 2026. I have no remaining means with which to use such a thing. The last cell phone I had that could act like a modem got retired in 2009 and the last time I had a dialtone in my house was 2010.

        But if I had to guess, then I'd guess that these time machines are still operational.

  • MontgomeryPy

    last Wednesday at 4:58 PM

    What a blast from the past. I completely forgot that I was a The World customer way back when.

• thesuitonym

  yesterday at 2:53 PM

  Interesting that they still have an old school webcam.

• _joel

  last Wednesday at 3:56 PM

  And now it's getting well stress tested

  • CalRobert

    last Wednesday at 3:57 PM

    Maybe you should try one of the other numbers at https://www.snowcrest.com/dialup/numbers.php - most support v.92!

At bottom, the Cincinnati, Ohio domainname URL now points to a "Site Not Found" page on Dreamhost^1

1. https://web.archive.org/web/20260513154601if_/https://nguyen...

Here is the /locality.html page

https://web.archive.org/web/20141217060926if_/http://nguyen....

• cormorant

  last Wednesday at 7:24 PM

  It still (again?) loads for me.

> 5. Date Operational......: You can use your birth date here.

Yikes, no!

• mikey_p

  yesterday at 3:47 PM

  It is not hard to find the average US citizen's birthday if you know their real name. Same things with addresses, can be painfully easy (a few minutes often).

  Let's just be honest, it's 2026 and you are advocating for security through obscurity.

• tkzed49

  last Wednesday at 5:29 PM

  why not?

  • kmoser

    yesterday at 4:05 AM

    It's a vector for identity theft.

    • kstrauser

      yesterday at 4:34 AM

      Birthdays are one of the absolute worst kept secrets on the Internet. There are entire sites that blab that information to anyone who asks.

    • mikey_p

      yesterday at 3:48 PM

      My name, and the very fact that I exist are vectors for identity theft. But that doesn't mean I should keep those facts secret either, or that simply attempting to keep them secret will have any effect whatsoever.

      • kmoser

        today at 4:01 AM

        Would you post your name, address, DOB, and SSN here? They're easily discoverable on the Internet anyway, so why would you try to keep them a secret? (This is a rhetorical question. I'm not asking you to post that info, for obvious reasons.)

    • thesuitonym

      yesterday at 2:57 PM

      You realize your birth date is public information, right?

Wonder if there is an equivalent to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

• deathanatos

  last Wednesday at 4:47 PM

  And here I was thinking Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ouKNv7GN16I)

  • waltwalther

    last Wednesday at 6:20 PM

    From Wikipedia: The name Taumata­whakatangihanga­koauau­o­tamatea­turi­pukaka­piki­maunga­horo­nuku­pokai­whenua­ki­tana­tahu translates roughly as "the summit where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, the slider, climber of mountains, the land-swallower who travelled about, played his kōauau (flute) to his loved one".

I had ulevitch.delmar.ca.us delegated to me until one day some IT dweeb just deleted it and when I complained he just said I didn't have any right to have it.

So I'd caution against this path for something you actually care about.

I had one, registered I think in 1991, back in the uucp bang days. Had to give it up due to changes in requirements and IIRC Nustar being a real pain. Would like to get it back but no desire to jump through hoops to do so.

Could I use Cloudflare's free nameservers instead of Amazon Lightsail?

• lights0123

  last Wednesday at 6:05 PM

  Cloudflare only supports managing top level domains on the Free plan.

I set up an account on www.localitymanagement.us and requested first.city.state.us and last.city.state.us. I attempted to login today and got a message that my account was suspended.

Anyone know why some larger cities are not listed? For example, I am noticing that Oakland, CA is missing. This would have been a major city in 1992 when the list was created as well.

• toast0

  last Wednesday at 4:54 PM

  Someone would have had to have signed up to administer the domain during the time that signups were available. In 1992, I think interest would have been pretty low in general. And once the internet became widely known, something.city.state.us domains were pretty unlikable. About the only thing they have going for them is the low low price of (usually) free.

• cmdoptesc

  last Wednesday at 6:53 PM

  That Neustar list is horribly outdated from 2009 and didn't list sf.ca.us and had scruz.net as the administrator for san-francisco.ca.us.

  I checked www.whois.us and oakland.ca.us is administered by locality-support [at] about [dot] us

  Try sending them an email?

  • nickswalker

    last Wednesday at 11:32 PM

    That indicates that approval has been rolled up into GoDaddy at this point, and you’ll have to get a notarized letter from the city for them to issue you a domain.

    • cmdoptesc

      yesterday at 1:47 PM

      Just saw your other comment here. That's a bummer. I've been lucky to have never dealt with GoDaddy.

  • vineyardmike

    yesterday at 6:46 AM

    Any idea who the current SF registrar is?

    • cmdoptesc

      yesterday at 1:48 PM

      Yup! Sonic.net

      `whois sf.ca.us` will give you the email of the registrar (thanks cogitosum).

• ceejayoz

  last Wednesday at 4:47 PM

  They have to want one.

• aaronharnly

  last Wednesday at 9:35 PM

  Yeah I want to know how to get my local government to register themselves as one of these.

Remarkable, I had absolutely no idea I could do this in my state. I suspect this post is going to cause a spike in applications as folks like me discover we can have one for free.

Definitely keep in mind that right or wrong, these hosts are unusual as far as most commercial services are concerned and it can reveal annoying edge cases in their software.

• cube00

  last Wednesday at 6:28 PM

  eBay still in 2026 can't send to subdomains.

  Use something like ebay@shipping.example.com and they send to ebay@example.com

  I had to check the server logs to find why I wasn't receiving any mail and now need a top level alias just for eBay to handle their broken mail infrastructure.

• servercobra

  last Wednesday at 6:53 PM

  I'm constantly annoyed how much trouble I have using a .health domain (looking at you T-Mobile). I can't imagine using this many subdomains off a .us.

• anticorporate

  last Wednesday at 5:43 PM

  True. I struggled to get signed up for my COVID vaccine back in 2021 because Walgreens wouldn't accept that my totally valid .rodeo email address could possibly exist.

  I still use that domain for most corporate accounts. Currently, my wireless carrier refuses to believe I exist in some of their systems (but not others) because of it.

  Fortunately, escalating complaints with large corporations with shitty practices is a hobby of mine.

• thomas_viaelo

  last Wednesday at 5:34 PM

  [dead]

I'm working on something like this... its: <city-name>.<country-iso2>.codify.city e.g.: https://los-angeles.us.codify.city or https://paris.fr.codify.city etc..... my goal is to replace sites from https://www.civicplus.com/ and https://www.revize.com/ with AI-native interfaces into city services, governments, economies etc... like a local AI-agent Economy managed by actual governing officials etc... but the admin is a separate product ATM.

https://codify.nyc is the one I am going to be launching first, hopefully in a few weeks. I only have 100 or so cities on board and live right now. They have been very useful in understanding all the mechanics and nuance of delivering services at the city/local level.

Your project looks interesting, let me know if you see any place we could work together.

• embedding-shape

  yesterday at 12:21 AM

  > its: <city-name>.<country-iso2>.codify.city

  > https://codify.nyc

  Sorry for maybe misunderstanding, but isn't it supposed to be "new-york.us.codify.city" you're about to launch, given the other examples you've made? Wouldn't "codify.nyc" be the wrong way around?

  • arionhardison

    yesterday at 4:21 PM

    [flagged]

Before you jump in, and because why not, there are also city-centric TLDs for purchase, with little oversight:

.nyc

.boston

.quebec

.miami

.vegas

> Registration of many locality domains have been delegated to various companies

Are these companies getting paid for this service?

I had one for a long time but the isp that was the local registrar is long defunct now

• NetMageSCW

  last Wednesday at 9:29 PM

  It is a bad idea to have any services come from your ISP that aren’t portable.

A few years back, I looked into registering a *.sf.ca.us locality domain and Sonic was the registrar back then.

Now, I'm trying to recreate how I found that, and I can't. But if anyone is interested, try: hostmaster [at] 50N1C [dot] net (spell sonic correctly).

• cogitosum

  last Wednesday at 6:51 PM

  whois sf.ca.us

  • cmdoptesc

    last Wednesday at 6:57 PM

    For some reason, I was using ICANN's lookup (lookup.icann.org) which came up empty. But yes, a simple whois from the commandline gave me the right contact. Thanks!

I wonder how reliable this is. Will AWS lightsail continue to work indefinitely for free? What if AWS changes the system in some way? What if the person hosting my locality becomes unavailable?

• notpushkin

  yesterday at 2:18 PM

  I suppose you can use any nameserver you like, the only problem is it’ll be a PITA to change it.

  (I’ve recently registered a .bt domain by filling out a PDF form, hand-signing it, scanning and sending to a Bhutan Telecom admin. Changing a nameserver would probably be a similar procedure now, and involves a one-time fee if I recall correctly.)

Great instructions! Well, I'll follow up and let you know if Gainesville, FL responds!

• last Wednesday at 6:45 PM

This is so awesome.

Can you setup wildcards? Like for example *.[name].san-fransisco.ca.us? That way I can do this once for my own name and have it setup for all future needs as well.

• EnigmaCurry

  last Wednesday at 6:40 PM

  Yes. The registrar is for the root domain. You provide your own DNS. DNS can do wildcards for any root domain its delegated.

> FL HOTDOG.MIAMI.FL.US. arodriguez@houseit.com

I'm very confused by this entry. There isn't even a miami subdomain, just a Dade subdomain.

• js2

  last Wednesday at 4:28 PM

  Delegation can happen at a dot, but does have to happen at each dot. The current referral sequence is:

  root-servers.net -> cctld.us -> localitymanagement.us -> miami.fl.us

  And it ends there with an NXDOMAIN. Unsurprisingly, a list archived in 2009[1] is no longer accurate. If I'm reading this Internet Monthly Report[2] correctly, that domain came into existence in October 1998.

  [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20090909141302/http://neustar.us...

  [2]: https://www.iana.org/archive/internet-monthly-reports/1998/i...

Interesting, claim is that:

MD BALTIMORE.MD.US. alby@uunet.uu.net

I am guessing that uunet email address is not going to go anywhere!

I wish there would be something like this in the UK but with county instead of state. E.g. swindon.wiltshire.uk or sheffield.southyorkshire.uk

• pbhjpbhj

  last Wednesday at 6:14 PM

  I was hoping there would be something funny like twatt.worcs.uk or reading.berks.uk ... That aside, what would you do with such a domain? You could register x.uk with Nominet UK presumably. Just a small matter of the bill.

• hnlmorg

  last Wednesday at 5:23 PM

  Buy the domain names then and offer those services.

  The US state ones are just sub-domains. city.state.us isn’t a TLD.

  • aquir

    last Wednesday at 7:41 PM

    someone has already registered all county.uk domains in 2019 :(

Aren’t there several states that have the same city name repeated within the state? I think there’d need to be a county delineator here too.

• TallGuyShort

  last Wednesday at 3:49 PM

  That gets extremely complicated. My town straddles the border between 2 counties. And you can't trivially have subdomains for counties and cities at the same level, because Wyoming has a Laramie city but it's in Albany County, not the neighboring Laramie County.

  Did this just inspire the next "Falsehoods programmers believe about... Federalism"?

  • mikey_p

    yesterday at 4:00 PM

    This comes up with school districts too. My home county in rural Ohio had a school district administration that oversaw all the schools in the county but there are two 'exempted' school districts. One is a town that is split between two counties, so the school district would fall in two counties. Hence it is "exempted" from both and the official name is "<TOWN NAME> Exempted Village Schools". The other one if the largest town in the county, which due to it's size voted to exempt itself from the services and administration of the county government, presumably since this single school has as many students as the rest of the county combined.

  • wat10000

    last Wednesday at 3:59 PM

    Virginia cities are independent, not within counties. And there's both a Fairfax City and Fairfax County. Making things even more confusing, the county seat is Fairfax City despite the city not being part of the county. The county has fairfaxcounty.gov while the city has fairfaxva.gov.

    There are a handful of other independent cities in the US, but the vast majority are in Virginia.

    • georgel

      last Wednesday at 4:37 PM

      St. Louis is like this as well.

• tialaramex

  last Wednesday at 3:54 PM

  If you have hierarchical naming, which DNS does, then the problem of name clashes is always a problem for whoever sits above those names and they can resolve it however they like.

  If your state thought it was a good idea to have two cities named "Star City" that's on them to resolve however they like. Trial by endurance for the city mayor? Draw lots? Everybody in the state votes? Not my monkeys, not my circus.

  • DonHopkins

    yesterday at 2:08 AM

    Look-alike Unicode characters.

• runjake

  last Wednesday at 3:52 PM

  You're right, but typically, when two towns in a state share a name, only one is an incorporated city at most. The other, or both, are usually unincorporated communities. Normally, unincorporated communities do not receive a city.state.us locality domain.

  • toast0

    last Wednesday at 5:26 PM

    For city.state.us, I'm pretty sure first to file (while filing was available) wins...

    Ohio doesn't (or at least historically didn't) have a highlander restriction for incorporated cities.

    Oakwood, Cuyahoga County was incorporated in 1951 although Oakwood, Montgomery County was incorporated in 1908. There's also an Oakwood in Paulding County, but its wikipedia page doesn't have an incorporation date or explicitly declare it incorporated or not. I thought there was a famous Ohio city with a same named city elsewhere, but I must have been thinking of somewhere else. I will note that Pennsylvania has an awful lot of same named Townships.

    City name in the US ends up being a pretty wild concept when you dig into the details. Often what people are using as a 'city name' is really the name of their post office which statistically has a high correlation with the city they live in. But of course, lots of people live outside incorporated cities, and postal boundaries are independent of political boundaries.

    • mikey_p

      yesterday at 4:11 PM

      Oakwood in Montgomery county is addressed as Dayton on all mail until you get to Kettering which has it's own name for addressing.

      A quick search shows that Oakwood in Paulding County has it's own PO and zip code 45873 and Oakwood, Cuyahoga County has 44146.

      I suspect that the postal service is much more forgiving on duplicate town names since the advent of zip codes.

• DrewADesign

  last Wednesday at 4:27 PM

  The edge cases always make things so difficult:

  Manhattan: New York County

  Brooklyn: Kings County

  The Bronx: Bronx County

  Queens: Queens County

  Staten Island: Richmond County

  All New York City. Same municipality, 5 counties.

  • kmoser

    last Wednesday at 4:36 PM

    There's also the edge case of the (unofficial) 6th borough of NYC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_borough

  • DonHopkins

    yesterday at 2:09 AM

    ny.ny.us

      New York City is a place so nice
      Everybody says it so they had to name it twice
      New York my happy love's you
      (I love you very much)
      I could not live without you
      So let's always keep in touch
    

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82f7BB6zNOc

• mikey_p

  yesterday at 3:55 PM

  No, historically the US postal service would make anyone who couldn't claim they had the name first change it. I grew up in a small town in rural OH that had to do this in it's history since the name they chose was already in use by another village/town in the state.

• youvebeenbad

  last Wednesday at 5:19 PM

  ooh, this reminds me of Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses...

  https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...

  • mikey_p

    yesterday at 3:56 PM

    Sadly Portland OR eliminated one of my favorites by introducing "South Portland" and eliminating significant leading zeros from address numbers.

See also: http://nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us/locality.html

Edit: already linked in the article! That's what I get for not reading to the end!

• odie5533

  last Wednesday at 3:36 PM

  Seems like the primary use for locality domains is to explain to others how to get locality domains.

Wish we had this option in Canada. This would be cool as heck.

could be very powerful, how to validate

This is really cool, but scrolling through the list I find it hilarious that the seventh largest city in the USA has no locality domain but small towns in my home state that I've never even heard of have one.

i wish this was in canada

Bummer, looks like most of the ones in South Dakota are assigned to noc@sd.net, so presumably they can't be used, despite being reserved.

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Only reason for this is for spam and shit