Registration of seattle.wa.us locality domains and others managed by NWNexus

Locality domains under .us are not a new thing and date back to RFC 1480. The process to register one, however, has not been easy (especially in the last 10+ years), given multiple changes in who actually runs the .us NIC, now currently known as About.us, as well as the associated federal oversight. This is unfortunate, because like the airwaves, I see these locality domains as a form of the commons that each of us should be entitled to and have a say in how it’s run.

I got a wild hair to set this domain (sleepless.seattle.wa.us) up about a month ago, and the process was a little frustrating. Minh Nguyen’s guide to locality domains is really useful, and the steps are more less the same with a few caveats, given that information changes:

• The delegated manager for seattle.wa.us and many other localities in Washington is NWNexus, as listed by both the old delegated managers list and the .us WHOIS service run by GoDaddy.
• NWNexus is now doing business as NuOz. They used to be a general ISP/network services company, but seem to have shifted their market slightly.
• While the listed registrar is domainrq at nwnexus.com, I could never seem to get a response to any messages at this address. They also seem to rely on pretty heavy spam filtering, and messages from an account hosted on Rackspace were bouncing completely.
• This led me to call their support/sales line, which wasn’t super helpful, but I was advised to email support at nuoz.com, which did in fact get a response from an RT-based ticketing system. Responses came from domainsadmin at nuoz.com, but I’m guessing support is the right intake channel.
• The use of the interim registration template (v2) worked fine, and I’ve used it to update the nameservers as well.

With a little persistence, it’s still possible to register one of these domains - but mergers, acquisitions, and changes in dba names may make this process more complicated. Everything seems to be working now after dealing with a few hiccups in DNS on the SDF side of things that felt a little unclear, but thanks to the membership team all seems to be resolved.