Comment by nickswalker
12 hours ago
Unfortunately the author is correct that you’re pretty screwed if the locality is no longer delegated. I messaged GoDaddy to register one in Boston, they asked for a _notarized_ letter on the local governments letter head approving. No one within the Boston city government knew what their procedure would be, and those willing to say yes didn’t have a notary around. They ended up citing a state law indicating that no locality domains were to be used for _government_ purposes in MA as their reason to say no, when of course that has no bearing on private use…
If anyone would like to band together to push city of Boston or Cambridge to start approving these, please let me know! I can revive some email chains.
I am not sure I understand. Are you saying boston.ma.us and cambridge.ma.us are no longer delegated? A whois record on both of the subdomains tells me there is a registrar for it. Either ways, I am happy to band together if it makes a difference.
That law was a reaction to a Federal thing (through CISA i think) to migrate all governments to the .gov domain in the US in the name of security and branding.
They were pushing it hard when DNSSEC was being babbled about by cyber people.
To be honest migrating government infrastructure to .gov makes it much easier to at least get some minimal handle on the extent of critical governmental infrastructure.
Totally agree, not a bad idea at all. Some local governments aligned their web presence around the tourism and chamber of commerce type organizations, which made it confusing for people to know where they had to pay their water bill vs. get tourism info.
> They ended up citing a state law indicating that no locality domains were to be used for _government_ purposes in MA as their reason to say no, when of course that has no bearing on private use… > If anyone would like to band together to push city of Boston or Cambridge to start approving these, please let me know! I can revive some email chains.
I'm confused by this. Some have migrated away from the locality domains but some are still in use even by official/state purposes.
Here's the website for the Newton, MA public schools: https://www.newton.k12.ma.us/
Belmont: https://www.belmont.k12.ma.us/
I believe Cambridge used to use one as well but I can't confirm that.