Yes, .us domains are restricted to people who have a bona-fide U.S. presence - passing the Nexus requirements laid down by the Registry. Very similar to .ca domains for Canadians. Many of the ccTLDs require a country presense in order to register a domain name with them.

.us really is the ccTLD for the United States, and not a domain name scam like some others. We also sell .tv, .cc and .vc and will soon be offering .dj, but these are very low volume compared to the rest. .com are our clear leaders, but .biz and .info are keeping up with .net and .org.

As for .biz and .info not being popular, you certainly cannot compare them to .com for popularity, but if you want a reasonably short, meaningful name on the Internet, you have to get beyond .com.

If you can get a domain like myflowers.biz, but you can only get myflowershopon5thavenueintheback.com, which makes more sense?

I'm not a domain speculator, and I don't believe that very many names have intrinsic value anyway since most people don't type names into their browser in order to locate a website - they use a search engine like MSN or Google and then bookmark the site if they find value in it.

What do I base this on? What's a Yahoo? How about an Amazon? A Google? Of the domains that you actually frequent, how many are named for anything really interesting, and how many are just successfully branded?

In my business, we have GoDaddy? Stargate? Network Solutions? Verisign? Nothing here that makes you believe they sell domain names.

Of course, I named by business after a large, flightless bird , so you can take my advise with a grain of salt.

-t