This seems a bit off the topic of this list but since it has been brought up... Please read RFC1480 about the current status of the .US domain or you may lead someone astray - we did! ;-) Our state government applied for a domain name in .GOV but the Internic directed them to the .US domain. All new US states are now being registered as "STATE.ss.US" where ss is the two-letter abbreviation. All educational institutions in the US except 4 year colleges and universities are being registered in the appropriate .US domain. This includes 2-year junior colleges, technical schools, and K-12. In addition, anyone in the USA may register in the .US domain although many organizations are still registering in other domains and there are no plans to "fold" those under the .US domain. The RFC specifies specific lower level domains. For example, city government would be CITY.theirname.ss.US . There are provisions for country-wide entities like FED.US (but I think most federal agencies are still being put under GOV) and DNI.US ("distributed national institute"). The authors of RFC1480 include information on how the specifications plan for delegations, duplicate name avoidance (how many Ben Franklin schools are there?), etc. But you really have to read the RFC because some of the cases aren't intuitive. They have provided lots of examples and "cases". At this time all of the "ss.US" zones are served by ISI and the other US domain servers. This meant that our state government had to get a delegation for the STATE.ND.US zone as well as 53 or so county delegations - lots of zones. It also means that within a state some zones will be handles by ISI.EDU and some by others. However, the authors of the RFC have said that this is a temporary situation because not all states are ready to take on their own state delegations (for EVERYONE in that state). The 2nd and 3rd level zones are listed in the Internic WHOIS database but no lower. One other point that may have been mentioned here. Some people think that high level domains like "EDU" were set up for the USA. That was supposedly NOT the case but in practice most of the EDU zones are for entities in the USA. Marty