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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brirec 39 minutes ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	fc417fc802 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.