The ".USA domain" is a scam.  The scammer has been spamming for several
months.

The global Top Level Domains (gTLDs) are:
.COM .EDU .INT .NET .ORG .AERO .BIZ .COOP .INFO .MUSEUM .NAME .PRO
There are also two-letter country codes (ccTLDs), listed here:
http://www.iana.org/cctld/cctld-whois.htm

The country code for the USA is .US.  I have had the name
truffula.sj.ca.us for ten years.  I also own gis.campbell.ca.us.
Very recently, the rules have changed on the .US domain.
It was very restrictive, and most names were free.  Now they are
going to run it like the other country codes.  See http://www.nic.us.
Yes we should tie down the important second level domain names (SLDNs)
as soon as they become available.

The authority for which domains are real is the Internet Corporation
for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).  It's supposed to be a democratic,
international body, but in practice it is a puppet of the US Department
of Commerce.  It outsources the operation of a "root server" that knows
where all the name servers are.  The "root server's" location is supposed 
to be a secret.  It feeds a set of "slave" or "secondary" servers, and
the whole Internet queries them.
The secondaries' network addresses are included in a file that comes with the
name server software that everybody runs.

All "the .USA domain" has to do is get the root server to recognize it.  
That will not happen.  "The .USA domain" tries to get people to install
a browser plug-in that knows about its "alternative" root servers, but
nobody does.  

There are a couple of real grass-roots alternative root-server
projects, but they are so far from critical mass that they are irrelevant, too.
James Love (of Nader's Consumer Project on Technology) was part of one.
He wanted to establish ".SUCKS" as a gTLD for critics of owners of the
corresponding .COM names.  Most people thought he was joking, so that never
got off the ground.  


Cameron