.us.com

TLD or not?

[mankman]

I see a few Registrars advertising the .US.COM extension. Is this a valid TLD or is this company called CentralNic capitalizing on the fact that they bought the us.com, uk.com, etc extensions...and what you're really buying is essentially a subdomain?.

[glengara]

Looks like a sub.....

[Laker]

.US.COM is a 2d level domain extension ... I have seen it referred to as a "third level domain" by those who want to scam an acronym out of it to be "tld".

In addition to .us.com, CentralNic has:

.EU.COM, .BR.COM, .CN.COM, .DE.COM, .HU.COM, .NO.COM, .QC.COM, .RU.COM, .SA.COM, .SE.COM, .SE.NET, .UK.COM, .UK.NET, .UY.COM & .ZA.COM

Many (some) companies have registered example-us.com in addition to their primary example.com domain.

[jcoronella]

When google first introduced sandboxing, these types of sub-domains were great because they bypassed it. That didn't last long at all, but really gave these otherwise junk sub-domains value for a short period of time.

They are not worth a thing now.

I suspect a couple engines actually devalue them, and for a couple others you don't need them anyway.

[mankman]

Thanks for the input. What I'm trying to decide is if it's worth it to get it just for name protection sake. I'm in charge of the domains for the company I work for and we have .com .net .us .org .biz as well as a few misspellings....merely for the sake of brand protection. I'm just wondering if this is something that is going to become popular (NetSol has it plastered really big on their home page) or if it's just a passing fad.

Thoughts?

[jtara]

or if it's just a passing fad.

It isn't even a passing fad - just a perpetual scam.

[Laker]

(NetSol has it plastered really big on their home page)

One registrar has .info domain registrations plastered on their homepage for USD 99¢ again.

I haven't registered any during this promotion.

I wouldn't register any .US.com domains either.

That said, peace of mind is priceless.

[jtara]

If you have a valuable domain you want to protect, I think you are better served by registering plural, dashs-between-words, prefixed ("the", "my"), etc. .com variations than .info and weird private non-TLDs.

[gpmgroup]

.info is getting quite a lot of development if you look at the number of pages indexed by Google for example .info now has over half the number of .co.uk pages indexed.

287m compared with 584m

.fr 332m
.it 313m
.info 287m
.ca 211m
.us 176m
.au 170m

[Webwork]

If your concern is "brand protection" I would think an email to the operators of the US.com "registry" would suffice.

I suspect a lawyer of some ability could seize the US.com domain, as one element of a damages award, IF he/she could show a pattern of the US.com operators countenancing "subdomain trading off" practices. Given the tenuous nature of their business model it would be in their best interest to vigorously policy against such "trading off" threats.

So, no, I see no need to protect your brand by such a registration, any more than I see a need to register your domain as a subdomain of millions of other domains.