I have three locality domains, all with different registrars in Oregon. Two are with unique delegated locality domain registrars (think old school consultancies or ISPs that still exist) and one directly via localitymanagement.us (GoDaddy/USTLD).

One of the registrars is from an out of state operator that has been dead for three years. I tracked his widow down and had a number of cordial conversations over about 18 months. I've helped his widow renew some personal domains but she's recently told me that she's going to stop paying the hosting bill of the locality registrar and it'll shut down June 1st. I've offered to take over hosting, we'll see if she is convinced.

Several other locality users will likely also see their domains disappear once that happens as the USTLD registrar will require a notarized letter from the city/county of that domain to approve any "new" (new in their system) domains. Not easy for any mid or large sized city in the US.

I love locality domains clearly, but the bureaucracy applied since the start has piled up over the years.

I do worry that this poor Seattle ISP is going to get DDoS'ed by outsider (find an appropriate locality please if you go down this route) due to the popularity of this article, though!

RIP Jon.

"RIP Jon."

In the 90s when learning about the internet I remember reading stuff written by "Jon Postel", a univeristy employee in California

Today, a curious student trying to learn about the internet would probably end up reading stuff written by "Big Tech" and/or academics who have financial relationships with these or other so-called "tech" companies

I remember Postel and one other person, perhaps at SRI, I forget her name, had a plan for these sort of hierarchical geographical domainnames. I recall it was _not_ commercial in nature. It "seemed like" Postel saw the internet, including DNS, as a public service. Needless to say, any such non-commercial vision was not realised

ICANN DNS became a money grab

If Postel had survived to today, would he have sold out like so many of his peers

I like to pretend he would not but I have no idea

I used to have some domains registered with "theparsec.com", and would communicate with the owner, "ML", on occasion. It was great, he was responsive and helped me out if an order didn't go through for some reason.

In 2022, their TLS certificates were off -- a subdomain used by a backend redirect process was no longer valid, so I contacted "ML" and they were unresponsive. I managed to get my domains to a new register by ignoring some TLS warnings and transferring them. As of July of 2022, I have not heard from "ML" and I assume that he passed away. I don't know their identity or what became of them. All I know is that their name is/was Mark.

Super interesting.

Naive question, what do you use the locality domain for?

The notarized letter may be easier to get than you think - if you live in the city/county. The key is being professional, polite, and present.