Recent Posts
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- Epik gets acquired again! The plot thickens…
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- Epik to reveal its owners soon
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- Shiba Inu outs itself as crypto new gTLD applicant
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- ICANN predicts flattish 2025 for domain industry
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- Have your say on police domain takedown powers
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- Domain universe grows despite .com drag
US scraps fucking stupid “seven dirty words” ban
Neustar and the US government have agreed to dump their longstanding ban on profanity in .us domains.
A contract change quietly published in July has now made it possible to register .us domains containing the strings “fuck”, “cunt”, “shit”, “piss”, “cocksucker”, “motherfucker” and “tits”.
These are the so-called “seven dirty words” popularized by a George Carlin comedy routine and incorporated into US censorship law via the Supreme Court decision Federal Communications Commission v Pacifica Foundation in 1978.
Neustar banned the strings from .us when it originally won the registry contract from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration in 2002, and kept it upon renewal.
Until recently, it was conducting post-registration reviews of new .us domains and suspending names that used the strings in sweary contexts.
However, a July contract amendment (pdf) has released Neustar from this duty, allowing registrants to register whatever the fuck they want.
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the change came about after itself and the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School complained to the government about the suspension of the domain fucknazis.us, which registrant Jeremy Rubin had been using to raise money to fight the extreme right in the US.
That domain was registered in late 2017, but Neustar appears to have been discussing whether to repeal the idiotic ban in various policy groups for at least three years.
When Network Solutions was the sole registrar for .com, .org and .net it too banned the seven dirty words but this practice fizzled out after ICANN introduced competition into the registrar space almost two decades ago.
Who actually uses .us though?
Maybe its numbers will improve now it can tap into the lucrative cocksucker market?
You had way too much fun writing this piece!