... Anyone in NY who wants a city-specific domain has had new-york.ny.us available for over a decade. ...
Back in the late IANA management period I looked at who owned what and found that six people owned over half of the major US metro media markets. When I wrote NeuStar's application for .us, a bid which the US DoC selected, I proposed to end this cyber-squatting on networks-of-cities scale. I was away from the office for something, and upon my return I found that NeuStar management had been convinced of a plan, a plan named after the two colors used on the whiteboard, to retain these parties in their networks of cybersquatting as "regional registrars" or some brain damaged thing, so that the growth and development of the dotted -- and free under the DoC contract -- side of .us would be retarded, and the flat side of .us would grow due to the dead ends of the hierarchies under the squatted-name.state.us stubs. There have been some intelligent uses of the dotted side, but only for names the IANA management period squatters didn't bother to grab, for free, at the time, so my former co-worker at the OSF Research Institute put up harvard.ma.us for the _town_ of Harvard. In their not very serious bid when the .us contract was up for renewal, GoDaddy could have, but failed to offer to reform the hierarchical .us name space. Flat name spaces mean more money to registries and registrars, so no shortage of junk has impeded the development of hierarchical name spaces, though they are quite successful under .edu, .mil, .gov, .uk, ... Eric