The US government has issued a Request for Information” (RFI) regarding the maintenance and management of the .US top level domain.  
Dot US is a country code domain (ccTLD) in a country dominated by generic top-level domains. Unlike the rest of the world, where at least half of the Internet community registers domains in their ccTLD, most American businesses and individual users register in COM, NET, ORG, or any of 1,000 other generic top-level domains (gTLDs). Of the 135 million domains estimated to be registered by Americans, only 1.8 million find their home in .US. 
Some of the world’s most prominent and successful ccTLDs are run by private sector nonprofits. Nominet runs the 11 million strong .UK domain. New Zealand’s .NZ domain (760,000) is run by Internet New Zealand Incorporated, a non-profit common interest charitable society. Germany’s large .DE domain (17.7 million registrations) is run by DENIC, a private not-for-profit Cooperative with a membership of roughly 300 internet companies.  
Dot US, on the other hand, is officially owned by the U.S. Commerce Department, a government agency. It acts as the policy authority but contracts out the management and maintenance of the registry to private companies. The contract sets the policy, but the contractor receives all the revenue and doesn’t pay Commerce anything, nor does Commerce pay the contractor anything.  
This arrangement has made dot US a fairly static place. Dot US still maintains a pre-GDPR Whois policy that gives anyone access to the private contact data of any registrant. It specifies fields for registration data that haven’t changed in 20 years and even mentions “fax number.” On 2002, the U.S. Congress passed a law creating a KIDS.US domain, in the vain hope that legislation (as opposed to attractive content) would magically make a domain a special space on the Internet for children. The law was so unsuccessful that Commerce suspended the domain in 2012, and it sits there doing nothing.  
In its RFI, issued by the Biden administration only three days before it left office, the Commerce Department states that it is interested in “modernizing” the dot US Statement of Work (SOW). It is looking at six areas: 

DNS Abuse 
Third party access to .us registration data, and registrant data privacy 
The Nexus Requirement (.US registrants must have a “nexus” to the United States, which is a limiting but defensible policy, but how it is defined and enforced can vary) 
The Kids.us Statutory Obligation 
Multistakeholder consultation on usTLD policy 
Cybersecurity and incident reporting 

All of these are worth “modernizing,” especially the privacy emphasis. We recommend that the new SOW redact sensitive PII for natural persons and enhance privacy, while allowing law enforcement to request full access of registrars. We think it is time to recognize that KIDS.US was just an unworkable idea, out of place in a world of ubiquitous social media and content networks appealing to children of all ages, and put it to rest forever. The country nexus should be reviewed, there are arguments for and against it, but there is likely an optimum to be found which retains a US identity without being too burdensome to enforce. Multistakeholder consultation is fine, but everyone needs to recognize that the choice-rich market for domain name registrations means that most stakeholders vote with their buying choices, not by sitting in on meetings and arguing over contract terms.  
But the Commerce Department should think bigger. Modernizing and revitalizing dot US might require a whole change of approach. The government should consider privatizing dot US and putting its management in the hands of a cooperative or nonprofit rooted in the American Internet users community. While it can be good to have stakeholder input into policy formation, the situation now is that the US government makes the big policy decisions, and the contractor runs some perfunctory consultative organizations that have little real influence.  The best way to promote “stakeholder influence” is to develop an alternative with contract terms that differ from ICANN’s in ways that appeal to registrants and introduce some real competition.

The US government already has the .GOV and its military the .MIL domain so it’s unclear why the U.S. Commerce Department is running a TLD.  
The dot US RFI had the feel of a loose end the Biden administration should have done something about but got distracted by all the other things. Perhaps the new administration can take a more comprehensive approach and reconsider the way the whole game works. Any privatization process, of course, would have to retain the equities of existing registrants, but it might open the door to a lot of new ones as well. 
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Source: Internet Governance Forum