.um was the Internet

country code Country codes are short alphabetic or numeric geographical Geography (from Greek: , ''geographia''. Combination of Greek words ‘Geo’ (The Earth) and ‘Graphien’ (to describe), literally "earth description") is a field of science ...

top-level domain A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System The Domain Name System (DNS) is a hierarchical and distributed naming system for computers, services, and other resources in the ...

for the

United States Minor Outlying Islands The United States Minor Outlying Islands is a statistical designation defined by the International Organization for Standardization The International Organization for Standardization (ISO ) is an international standard development orga ...

. It was administered by the United States Minor Outlying Islands Registry. Until late 2006 USMIR was housed at the

University of Southern California , mottoeng = "Let whoever earns the palm bear it" , religious_affiliation = Nonsectarian—historically Methodist , established = , accreditation = WSCUC , type = Private research university , academic_affiliations = , endowment = $ ...

Information Sciences Institute (USC-ISI), which was the original administrator of .us prior to NeuStar absorbing that role. In January 2007, the

Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN ) is an American multistakeholder group and nonprofit organization A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not ...

reportedly dropped the .um domain from the master list of domain names in response to the domain's being unused and USC-ISI's desire to divest itself of responsibility for the domain. In November 2007 at the registry website of ''www.nic.um'' a message stated "Registration is CLOSED at this time. We are only accepting Registrar Accounts." Links to a brief description of each of the individual American islands were also given. In December 2007, registration was opened on an experimental basis with an "Annual Account Maintenance" fee of $1,200 and a $30 annual domain registration. Since the USC-ISI divested itself of this registry, in late 2006, EP.NET hosted USMIR and continued to administer it. According to the www.nic.um site at that time, the TLD was no longer affiliated with USC-ISI and had spun off the venture into an independent company, USMIR, which has the same contact information as that of the

limited liability company A limited liability company (LLC for short) is the US-specific form of a private limited company. It is a business structure that can combine the pass-through taxation of a partnership A partnership is an arrangement where parties, ...

EP.net. Accessing the website without the "www" subdomain returned a copy of the main site for ''EP.net''. Some .um websites, like 'hotel.um' and 'co.um' appeared after the TLD registry opened; however, as of April 20, 2008, the .um domain has been removed from the DNS root zone. It appears ICANN took the action of removing .um from the root since USC-ISI requested this. Whether USMIR will refund domain owners is not known. According to the revocation report on the IANA website, the U.S. DOC has approved the removal and has also instructed ICANN not to reassign the domain without prior approval from the U.S. Department of Commerce.

References

External links

IANA .um whois information
(as of April 21, 2008 ICANN has updated this to reflect the removal from the root zone).

{{DEFAULTSORT:Um Country code top-level domains Communications in insular areas of the United States United States Minor Outlying Islands Computer-related introductions in 1997 sv:Toppdomän#U

See also

References

External links