newsletter://mv.com March 2002 New top level domain registrations We have been working on adding some new top level domain names to our domain registration functions. We've made some available as of this writ- ing, and others will be coming available as either the Internet registrars make them ready or as we finish implementing our procedures for processing them. The brief information presented here is current as of March 22 2002. We're getting the others ready quickly, so check our web page or ask our Customer Service representatives for up to date information -- as well as more detail. Go to our web page at http://www.mv.com/ and click on "Rates and Services" -- you'll see the domain registration section listed there. .INFO -- available now: The .INFO top level domain is open and available now, for the same annual price as registrations in .COM, .NET, and .ORG . The .INFO domain is a new name available for registration of any name that isn't already taken. The basic domain name (other than .INFO) must be at least 3 characters long, but other than that follows the same guidelines as any other domain name (must begin and end with a letter or digit, and con- tain only letters, digits, and hyphens). When you register a new .INFO domain, you must sign up for a minimum of two years. Our charge for this initial registration is $24, with a $12/year renewal. .US -- preregistrations available now: .US is a country code top level domain for the United States. Until recently, management of the US domain was fairly decentralized, but with rules governing the kinds of names that could be registered. For the most part, names had to conform to patterns based on the geographic area served and on the type of entity involved. In the fall of 2001 the administration of the .US domain was awarded to Neustar, Inc. While the old, currently-registered names will be kept in place, new registrations will be more like other familiar top level domains. There are some requirements, as noted here and on our web page. Registration in the .US domain is currently in a "Sunrise" period. "Sunrise" applicants must hold a trademark or service mark at the US Patent and Trademark Office, and the domain name must be consistent with that trademark or service mark. Sunrise applications end on April 9. Between April 9 and April 24, these applications will be granted, selecting from duplicate names randomly. Sunrise registrations must be for a 5-year period; if your application is granted, we will charge you $60 for this registration. After April 24, registrations will be taken on a first-come first- served "real time" basis. From then on, applicants for .US domain names will have to meet one of three "US Presence" requirements -- roughly, you have to be a US Citizen, a business incorporated in the US, or have a bona fide presence in the US. In cooperation with the OpenSRS registrar, MV Communications is taking orders for these domain names. These advance orders will be placed in a queue and fed into the Neustar registration when the real-time process is opened on April 24. To help this process, you can select up to 6 domain names for each application. Real-time registrations will be charged $12/year and must have an initial 2-year registration (for $24). As with the sunrise applications, you will only be charged if your application is accepted. Other top level domain names (.CA, .BIZ, .NAME, .TV): Please watch our web page for the status on these names. The time of year for pranks April 1 is coming soon. (That is probably news only to a very small number of you.) We'd just like to take a short paragraph to warn you not to be too gullible when that date hits. Every year on April 1st thousands of Internet pranksters take the opportunity to create April Fools jokes -- in years past we've seen official-looking documents about how Microsoft is acquiring the Catholic Church, about how the Internet is closed for clean- ing, on a standard for a hypertext coffee pot control protocol, and so forth. Be especially wary if you see something idiotic that makes you want to sit down and draft a well-reasoned rebuttal -- check the date first. By the way, your shoe is untied. mediaone.net vs attbi.net vs attbi.com An issue of possible interest to many of you is the recent domain name change of the MediaOne cable network. MediaOne was acquired some time ago by AT&T but continued to use mediaone.net domain names for most if not all of those subscribers it acquired. Recently AT&T was (probably) forced to give up the mediaone.net domain as a result of a lawsuit from a business that felt it was entitled to that name and was suffering damages from the cable network's use of the name. (The details of the suit are neither here nor there for the purposes of the few words written here.) AT&T/MediaOne cable customers have scrambled of late to change over to using names in the attbi.com domain name instead of in mediaone.net . Some of the names were straightforward substitutions, some were not. The tran- sition was due to be finished in mid-March, and indeed we observed that most of those mediaone.net names stopped working around that time. So where do you come in? Some of you are also customers of AT&T and have (or had) mediaone.net addresses; but many more of you probably corre- spond with people or businesses with those addresses. You may be affected in any of these ways: * you may be sending mail to old mediaone.net addresses (or accessing the domain name in other ways) -- make sure you get the correct new address. * You may be sending mail to a new attbi.net address accidentally- that won't work, because the domain name is attbi.com, not attbi.net. We're seeing a significant number of emails stuck in our queues and eventually bouncing back because of this error. * You may have an account at MV that in one way or another involves a mediaone.net address. For example, you may have a forwarding address set up; you may have a web page with reports being sent to a mediaone.net address; you may have a domain name with some of its com- ponents resolving to a mediaone.net address; your email billing address may be something at mediaone.net . We've tried to locate as many of these as we could and contact the affected customers, but please consider whether you have this problem. Political Letters Followup In late February we issued a couple of email bulletins to all of our customers having mailboxes at MV Communications. We have very rarely done this -- you can probably count on one hand the number of times we've sent mass email to our customers over nearly 11 years of being an ISP. This time we sent an alert about a political issue that's very important to the future of independent ISPs. We won't belabor it again here, other than to say that if you missed it you can still go to http://www.mv.com/issues/ and read about the Tauzin/Dingell House bill to find out what it's all about. We'd like to thank you all for the tremendous support that this mail- ing received. Unfortunately the House bill passed -- and as we predicted this was used as "proof" by the FCC of what Americans wanted. The FCC almost immediately acted to give a greater monopoly position to cable oper- ators, and is in the process of doing similar things for the Bell companies such as Verizon. Some of these actions are open for public comment, some are not. We will try to keep the "issues" URL (http://www.mv.com/issues/) updated with what we think are important things to consider. We are also very appreciative that Rep. Sununu "got it" and voted against H.R. 1542 in the House. This was a gratifying rational stand. Make no mistake: there were no party lines here and we are not suggesting any partisan approval. We're just happy for the stand and the vote. MV Communications, Inc. PO Box 4963, Manchester, NH 03108 (603) 629-0000 .