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Comment by fc417fc802 | Hacker News Reader

You say "registered" to you as though this was via an official registrar but surely you mean that someone rented ca.us and decided on their own to lease out subdomains to people?

(Aside, I always see "owned" and "bought" but you can only ever "lease" under the ICANN system as the present situation so clearly demonstrates.)

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Historically, xx.us (where xx is a two letter state code) domains have been owned* by the named US state, which then would issue subdomains on top. I believe this was originally planned and set up by ICANN themselves.

*: I realize that “owned” is a loaded word here, but (1) I’m referring to a registrar/issuer, which makes it yet more complicated as to how much “ownership” (de facto or otherwise) a given entity may have, and (2) I really don’t give a fuck about pedantic word choice if the meaning is unambiguous.

My aside wasn't intended to be pedantic, rather observing the apparent inconsistency in how it appears people think about these matters versus what the present situation illustrates the reality to be.

> but (1) I’m referring to a registrar/issuer, which makes it yet more complicated

We're also talking about a ccTLD which makes it even more complicated. AFAIK those fall entirely under the jurisdiction of the respective UN recognized government although I don't know how strong that agreement is in practice (treaty versus something else).

So at that point I guess we've roughly got ICANN -> US federal government -> CA state government -> registrar -> private party -> sublet.

The way it worked is that someone nominally representing the CA State Government had* ca.us, and they in turn gave* san-jose to someone who nominally represented San Jose, los-angeles to someone who nominally represented Los Angeles, santa-cruz to someone who nominally represented Santa Cruz, and so on. city-name.ca.us domains were still free (and charging for .com and .org domains was a new thing at the time); you would look in the zone file to see who owned* a given domain, email them with your nameserver names and IP, and they would add it to their zone.

This isn’t how things are done these days; names visible to the public are pretty much always in the form {domain}.{tld} or sometimes {name}.{domain}.{tld} (e.g. my own https://samboy.github.io). Registration is now done by bots and companies that spam you to death to try and get more money from you (the Internet wasn’t like that in the beach.santa-cruz.ca.us days). Domain names with multiple levels of delegation aren’t around they way they used to be.

* rented/leased/had control over/whatever

> This isn’t how things are done these days

The old locality domains still exist, and in many localities you can still register them today by the same "email a request to some sysadmin" process. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48122635

Your beach.santa-cruz.ca.us domain is still in DNS, just with a broken delegation chain. You could reclaim it right now by setting up a nameserver at reality.samiam.org.

I’m amazed beach.santa-cruz.ca.us is still around. I’ve given it some SSL certs and have reclaimed it:

https://beach.santa-cruz.ca.us/

Thanks for checking the zone files of the parent domain to verify it’s still there.

Wait what haha. Do you also own samiam.org?

Judging by his username (strenholme) and the contents of https://samiam.org/ (Sam Trenholme's webpage), he does indeed!

  > AFAIK those fall entirely under the jurisdiction of the respective UN recognized government

How does that work for e.g. Taiwan, where the UN recognises the mainland government's claim to sovereignty in practice?

It's complicated and political, like always. Officially, the ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code list is used to decide who gets a ccTLD. (And Taiwan is included there.) But for example ".su" still exists for historical reasons, even though the Soviet Union is long gone (and its code is listed as "exceptionally reserved", which I assume translates as "we have no fucking idea what to do here.")

This raises an interesting question. If they aren't strictly following UN recognition then would it be possible for ICANN to award control to one party while the UN recognizes an opposing party as the legitimate government?

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