The Neustar registry and the US government have agreed to amend the contract that lets Neustar manage the .us ccTLD since 2002. Until recently the contract included a clause that made it impossible to register .us domains containing the strings “fuck”, “cunt”, “shit”, “piss”, “cocksucker”, “motherfucker” and “tits”. Their Russian equivalents are even more strictly tabooed than in English, however, there are grounds to believe that the translation is known even to those who have a poor command of English.
This ban had long been a target for jeers in the US because the fact that there is actually a list of banned words means these words were published on this list. But the ban was raised not because of some laughs but because of the complaint about the suspension of the domain fucknazis.us filed against Neustar by Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard Law School. The domain was registered to raise money to counter the increasing extreme right in the US. The registry and the US government decided to change the contract to probably avoid such collisions in the future. Domain Incite notes sarcastically that the new amendment may increase the interest in the US ccTLD, which cannot be called popular with local users.
