Use this version. Email this to a friend. Angling for a role in the world of electronic media, the U.S. Postal Service said it wants to manage a top-level Internet address domain that would allow it to take advantage of possible electronic services in the future.
Individuals also can obtain .us domain addresses.
With the growth of the Internet, USPS now must compete with e-mail messages, which bypass the agency. In an effort to expand its business, USPS is testing new electronic services, including first-class mailing through the Internet and security services such as the electronic postmark, which puts a date and time stamp on an electronic message. The hope is that these types of services could be integrated with the .us domain addressing infrastructure to spur the growth of electronic commerce worldwide. The USPS proposal is a subset of a larger issue regarding management of the Internet. Last month the White House released a report that calls for the U.S. government to turn over management of Internet addressing to a private organization that would act on behalf of the Internet as a whole.