WASHINGTON -- The US Postal Service wants to grab control of a key, untapped portion of the Internet.
America's postal workers should have the exclusive right to manage the nation's .us top-level domain names, an official said Tuesday.
The government is the only choice to protect consumers' privacy and make decisions in public, USPS representative Eric Wimer told a US Department of Commerce hearing. "These regulations and administrative procedures are already in place."
About 10,500 Internet addresses -- largely Web sites -- are currently located in .us. Because of long and awkward names -- such as http://www.ci.daytona-beach.fl.us/ and http://www.beth.k12.pa.us/ -- companies have abandoned the space to municipalities.
Proponents of the .us domain hope that increased publicity -- and perhaps rules allowing companies to register names such as acme.us -- will spur interest in the subject.
Wimer said the federal government could create a new subsidy to get more Americans online.
"That phrase is not particularly well-liked this decade in Washington ... but there's a balance between private-sector involvement and accommodating, making sure universal service flows out to the nth degree," Wimer said.
For nearly a year, USPS officials have been itching to take over the .us portion of Internet governance. The White House encouraged the scheme, a spokesman said in May.
The move comes at a time when the venerable USPS is increasingly threatened by technology. According to one recent estimate, the real price of a first-class stamp has quadrupled in the last 30 years, while the cost of a long-distance phone call fell 88 percent. The USPS recently spent US$5 billion on automation equipment, but the number of full-time employees simultaneously increased by 5 percent.
Part of the USPS' revenue base -- it took in $60 billion last year -- is shrinking because of online bill payments and technologies such as email and faxes, said Jim Lucier, a technology analyst at Prudential Securities.
"It's a 19th-century industrial model. It may not be the best model," Lucier said. "The postal service is an organization entering a crisis period. It relies on a 19th-century industrial model and manual labor."
Wimer's proposal came during a full-day meeting convened by the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration to puzzle out the future of .us.
The Department of Commerce last year took the final steps toward privatizing global domains such as .com and .net. Through a legal agreement with the University of Southern California, the .us domain is the last remaining public area the government oversees.
Last October, the USPS sent a 14-page proposal to NTIA suggesting that it "coordinate the administration of the .us" top-level domain. Details are still scarce, and Wimer offered few more on Tuesday, but one likely plan would be to link email addresses to US mail addresses. Another would be to provide tax-funded email accounts.
A better solution would be to have the Federal Communications Commission oversee .us, the Domain Name Rights Coalition proposed.
"I'd like an agency with a history of creating rules that foster competition," Kathryn Kleiman said. "I'd like an organization charged with protecting the public interest.... There is an organization that does this everyday. It is called the Federal Communications Commission," Kleiman said.
A third proposal would create domains such as news.us, name.us, assoc.us, and isp.us.
Government officials said they would consider the suggestions and asked for more detailed feedback.
"We asked people to come back to us in the next month," said Becky Burr, associate administrator of NTIA. "We need to regroup and understand what our possibilities are. There's a lot of work that needs to be done to form consensus and grow consensus."
