[thelist] what means .us.com?

[kasimir-k]

Erika scribeva in 26/08/2007 5:18:
> Dan, PERFECT.
> 
> That was the info I needed.  And their "whois" page shows the correct 
> administrative contact.. I find it really odd though that "whois.org" 
> doesn't acknowledge this domain extension,

Not at all odd - as Lee pointed out

Lee Kowalkowski scribeva in 25/08/2007 20:30:
 > I think it might just be a case that us.com is a normal .com domain
 > name (www.us.com) - which is currently owned by a company who think
 > it's cool to sell some sub-domains.

But let me put it in more simple words:

.us.com is not a domain extension

.com is the tld (top level domain) to which domain .us belongs

More specifically, .com is a generic top level domain (gTLD) - there are 
also country code top level domains (ccTLD) (e.g. .us for the USA and 
.fi for Finland). Usually domain names are registered as second level 
domains, e.g. example.com, but for some ccTLDs registrations are done at 
the third level, like in the UK (.co.uk, .org.uk, etc.)

However, with .com, domain names are registered on the second level, so 
'us' is the domain name in 'us.com'. But of course the owner of us.com 
may create (and sell) subdomains to their domain name, like 
'www.us.com', 'yourcompany.us.com' or 'fourthlevel.yourcompany.us.com'.

> and that dreamhost regarded 
> the domain as "unregistered."  Kind of disturbing, actually...  but at 
> least I know where the domain name came from now.

Well, yes, they seem to have a bit buggy script there... If you try 
us.com it'll tell you it's taken. Even if you add the third level 
sub-domain 'www' there (www.us.com), it knows it's taken. But any other 
third level domain confuses it, so it gives 'foo.us.com' as available.

> (I think what the world needs are a bunch more domain name extensions.)

For nice introduction on the subject read through 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_system

.k