It seems like the right thing they should do is discontinue new registrations but continue to honour existing ones (+ continuing to reserve any 2LD that has a 3LD registered on top). It’s a bit insane that they can decide to just terminate all existing 3LD registrations. One would hope that they’d at least continue to reserve the 2LDs for some period to avoid domain squatting, but this isn’t mentioned in the proposal and I doubt Verisign would graciously do so.
Maybe they want to avoid the ambiguity between john.doe.name versus john-doe.name, and I assume they prefer the latter scheme because it probably sells better. Nevertheless, discontinuing existing domains is disgraceful.
Even that doesn't pass basic scrutiny. The same ambiguity can and always will exist with tim-apple.com and tim.apple.com - there's nothing here that needs fixing.
True, they can’t outright prevent the ambiguity, but much fewer people will go to the trouble of establishing such subdomains when the option isn’t directly offered by the registrar.
This is my theory because, a priori, 3LDs should be more profitable than 2LDs, because with 3LDs John Doe and Jane Doe don’t have to compete over doe.name, but instead can each separately purchase john.doe.name and jane.doe.name. Apparently, however, that’s not a benefit of 3LDs in practice, which leads me to conclude that john-doe.name and jane-doe.name just sell better.
Prior to reading the OP blog post, I had never looked into the particular rules that .name has.
To me, prior to knowing how it works, I would have assumed that either
a) john.doe.name would be a subdomain that someone who was just starting out had gotten for free supported by ads. Similar to having johndoe.freewebs.com back in the day. Not something most people would use for anything professional.
or,
b) doe.name was registered by one of the people in a family of Doe’s where every Doe is pretty closely related. For example, John of john.doe.name and Jane of jane.doe.name are husband and wife, or third cousins, or what have you. Most of the content, I would assume, is mostly about things that relate to the family. Like maybe one guy is doing a family genealogy project tracing the roots of this little cluster of Doe’s back in time and has made a site covering the findings from his research. And another one probably has some photo albums with pictures of like previous Thanksgivings and other family get togethers. In other words, nothing I would care about unless I was in their family or a very close friend of the family.
I would not have guessed that .name 3LDs worked the way that it did if I hadn’t read about it.
And on the other hand, if I saw just www.doe.name or johndoe.name, I would not make such assumptions. It would be not much different than seeing www.doe.com or johndoe.com respectively. I would just assume that .com was already taken and therefore they used .name, or that they happened to like the .name TLD because it emphasises that their site has their name as domain name.
Mr. Fraser registered neil.fraser.name in 2002, when 2nd level registration under .name was unavailable; fraser.com had been registered in 1996 and neilfraser.com in 2000; he may have been able to get .org or .net, their registration dates are later, but they may have been registered and there was a gap --- my personal domain shows a creation date of 2003, but I registered it much earlier and abandoned it, but got it back after it was registered and then abandoned by someone else.
.name added 2nd level registration in 2004 and it seems to be vastly preferred. .us added 2nd level registration in 2002 and it was vastly preferred to the locality based naming. People don't want to have to educate their contacts about "weird" domains, which includes having an "extra" dot in your hostname.
I can say, as a SysAdmin, I have been taught and tell my users to check the domain to verify a website is real.
It's a strange edgecase that the owner of John.Doe.com does not need to own Doe.com
In every other case that I know about, to own the Joe subdomain of Doe.com, you would need to own Doe.com
edit: I guess I've gotten so used to the government 3LDs I just don't even see them anymore, or just see something like .co.uk or .edu.us as a TLD by itself, but yeah those exist too. Still the exception to the rule
That is definitely not true. There are literally thousands if not tens of thousands of well known domains that do this. .co.uk is a very common example.
.name is still a weird edge case because of the naming rules. Whether or not all subdomains under doe.name belong to the same person depends solely on whether the first person registered "doe.name" (in which case they do) or "john.doe.name" (in which case they don't, and "doe.name" is excluded from purchase as a standalone domain).
The fact that multiple organizations need to keep a public list of known 3LDs proves it's the edge case, does it not?
"Here's a list of things that look like subdomains for you to treat as 3LDs instead of subdomains" sounds exactly like the solution to an edge case to me.
You can almost guess someone's age from that alone - they're more rare, but long domain names still appear that encode a city and a state, and you could just "grab" the first part when signing up.
Outside of the context of ccTLDs and city.state.gov etc, I struggle to think of examples 3LD+ domains where they are owned and operated by completely different concerns than the parent. If at some point you could just register your own mysite.state.gov domains willy nilly that's probably before my initial time online around 2000.
Another poster raised the point of hosting services which is valid. But at present outside of that example and the above I really can't think of an example where you have a link to entity.com and you have any significant cause to verify the identity beyond the 2LD.
I remember I had beach.santa-cruz.ca.us at one point registered to me. I owned beach.santa-cruz.ca.us, someone else owned santa-cruz.ca.us, yet someone else owned ca.us, and I believe Network Solutions took care of .us at the time.
You say "registered" to you as though this was via an official registrar but surely you mean that someone rented ca.us and decided on their own to lease out subdomains to people?
(Aside, I always see "owned" and "bought" but you can only ever "lease" under the ICANN system as the present situation so clearly demonstrates.)
None of these examples are of actual separate registration/ownership of a 3LD from the parent 2LD. Cloudflare owns the domain for myproject.pages.dev and hosts all the relevant infra. Not to say that there isn't a different entity represented by the 3LD than the 2LD but it's not exactly the same.
Also I would not consider the examples of tumblr and reddit to be relevant. A person's blog on myprofile.tumblr.org is still the tumblr organization. This would be true for reddit even if they didn't redirect. Reddit admins moderate content on all subreddits.
The point on hosting providers is well taken. You do have to consider x.pages.dev as the wild west not cloudflare of course. One difference though is you will never receive an email from x.pages.dev asking you to do something. The domain ownership still does play a part.
Yet that is a problem the owner of such a domain has freely entered into by buying that domain, it's their right to keep it despite this apparent problem, if they wish.
Understood, and .name isn't being used enough in business to worry about 'the effect it will have on my users'. Just pointing out that it doesn't work like the 'norm' (although I guess it's not quite as unique as I thought, either)
Hello sysadmin. Good luck navigating the internet.
What you should know, and what your browser does know and automatically applies cookie policy and colouring your URL bar, is the Public Suffix List: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Suffix_List
It will let you know that, for example, one does not need to own .co.uk to own the subdomain foo.co.uk.
I appreciate this, and yeah the government/education ones slipped my mind, but I stand by the fact that the reason a list needs to be kept in the first place is because this is the edge case and not the norm.
Was it even possible to register just a second level .name domain name? It sounds like it wasn't, so therefore no one would be using john-doe.name and there'd be no ambiguity.
Another thing that should be obvious and yet they refuse to do: when there is a single third-level customer for a given second-level, offer them a way to get the second level domain. I've been asking VeriSign this for 15+ years, they always said no, even if at some point they confirmed that there were no other third-level than mine under that second-level domain. They're insane and should not be in charge.
I'm surprised they don't just do that, and maybe even to go a little further, disallow renewals so you can phase people out and reclaim domains you can sell.
Whether disallowing renewals or terminating them tomorrow, there's still the same core problems, only the date of the offense changes: (1) seizing people's names that they've established, breaking innumerable things including email and server hostnames, and (2) the possible resale of the 2LD fraser.com to a third party who will be free to do malicious things like reading OP's email, redirecting his traffic, or extorting him, to sell continued access at any price demanded.
There's one less core problem: those who just bought/renewed their domain e.g. yesterday are fucked out of both their money and forced to migrate sooner than they could have reasonably planned for. People's who registrations expire and they are unable to renew is a very different level of unfairness and inconvenience.
In either case, the security concern should be directly addressed.
That would be so cool and would make these limited hot commodities.
.name was one of the very first expansions of gTLDs back in the very early 2000s. It's a shame that it's being shut down as it was spearheaded by the ICANN itself rather than some registrar / investor like Donuts, Inc.
I suppose this is impractical as someone has to run the registry and there are costs associated with that. But don't the domain fees cover it?
From having worked in that space what feels another lifetime ago, I vaguely recall that you can just offload the registry work to a registry that would manage this together with a mountain of other TLDs.
As I recall it. This was mostly a money scam that targeted private users with ads like "make sure to claim to your .name domain so no one else does it and use it to impersonate you". It was stupid from the beginning and never took off.
This risk factor is similar to one I brought up during architectural review of an IoT company I helped to build. It's why the identity certificates our devices used were entirely disconnected from domain names, and why the discovery protocol I put together did not rely on registered domains, but could use these as an untrusted part of discovery.
Domain names are leased. Things that are leased can disappear. The company leasing these assets could go bankrupt. They could weasel their way out of agreements as Verisign has done here. Any identity that is grounded in leased assets is built on shaky ground. It's also why I'm dubious of the way that e-mail addresses have become tied to online identity.
I'm not saying that what Verisign has done is right, but this behavior is expected. Those of us who went through the (dot) bomb era remember just how shaky this infrastructure can be.
I'm sorry that .name people are going through this. Even though it's a risk I expected, that doesn't make this okay.
I freaked out for a second because I've owned `dvt.name` for like 15 years. `.name` is not getting terminated, so it's important to be precise here. The third-level x.y.name (where you're the `x`) is getting terminated, and the respective `y.name` domains are going to be released.
Still a crappy thing for people, but it does not affect owned second-level domains.
There should be a conflict resolution to gracefully degrade the third level to 2nd level when there is no competing name on the second level.
But I didn't think about the 1st level competitors. There'd still need a mechanism to resolve that...
1. First come first serve? (e.g. whoever registered a y.name first, whether x is bob or sue is determined by the earliest registrant on record)
2. Lottery/random selection?
3. Bidding war?
I think the problem is 2nd level domains who have the same name will be a problem when they find out all these other 3rd level are now expiring and can run a route to spoof? Likely wouldn't happen, but with the fuckery in the DNS that can happen... This is such a rash and weird decision to push through so quickly just because engineers find it "easier" while ignoring the implications of the move, seemingly when it comes to larger scale security.
I assume there would have to be some method to prevent routing of third level domains to subdomains of two-levels... (or is that just me being a fool yet again, assuming we have competent administration of our systems).
You are technically correct, but Verisign billed buying an x subdomain as if the y domain was part of a stable infrastructure. Which it kind of was until they decided to pull the rug.
The Public Suffix List is the closest thing we have to the "subdomain/TLD bit", but afaik it doesn't include wildcards like `*.name`. It does influence TLS though (or possibly just browsers) in that a wildcard cert for an entire TLD or public suffix won't be honored, nor will a public CA issue such a cert.
Still, I'm not sure there's any easy technical fix for the .name debacle.
From what it sounds like, unlike domains under other TLDs, when you purchase a domain under .name you always purchase specifically the three-segment domain.
i.e. I own john.doe.name, you own george.joe.name. Once this change goes through, only "doe.name" can be owned, so who gets it?
I own a .name domain that is an initialism for my wife and I, and Namecheap never gave me any problems adding a record for vpn.mwai.name, for example. In fact I never even realized you could register a 3LD, much less that this was the intended(?) behavior.
It kind of seems like an insane TLD structure to begin with, right? I always thought .co.uk was bad (you're just pinning yourself to whoever owns the .co. part, but at least browsers have some suffix list where you can't, I don't know, hijack some login cookie for all of .co.).
Joe Smith and John Smith can independently register joe.smith.name and john.smith.name, do browsers have a wildcard suffix list for the 2nd level of `.name` specifically, or can Joe set a cookie on all of .smith.name?
I know about the public suffix list - I was wondering about the wildcard specifically. In the very issue you linked to, as of 2025, it seems this was still unresolved...:
> We have no plans to modify the .name entries at this point in time. We are aware of the implications of adding a wildcard, therefore we won't.
Yeah, apparently they both (used to) offer unbounded registrations of 3LDs and unbounded registrations of 2LDs? So if I see j.doe.name, the only way to find out if "doe.name" is a public suffix or not, i.e. if I should (not) be able to set a cookie on it, would be to email the registrar?
So does that mean that in practice, .name domains were always treated by browsers like regular 2LDs, meaning the cookie and origin protection was always broken for those domains?
Doesn't sound like good news for the guy in the OP...
I'm just saying that they have discussed the situation. They seem to have no answer and for cookies and similar things the answer probably is "maybe don't run security critical web stuff in the third level under .name".
IIRC orgs like letsencrypt also use the PSL for rate limits, so there are probably more issues that are not browser-based.
There end up being some weird edge cases where there are some countries which have both the equivalent of .co.uk but also allow registrations directly under the two-letter country code as well. .mx is one such case where most business are, e.g., costco.com.mx, but it’s also possible to register directly under .mx as well so Toyota Mexico is toyota.mx and not toyota.com.mx (the latter is registered, and ostensibly to Toyota, but the whois and nslookup records give very different results and the website doesn’t load when I try to visit it).
Since neither smith.name nor the wildcard *.name appear in the Public Suffix List (https://publicsuffix.org/), browsers would likely allow any page on a *.smith.name domain to set cookies for .smith.name.
There was an effort to properly handle the .name 2LDs, but it was never resolved because there’s no easy way to tell a reserved 2LD (open for 3LD registrations only) apart from a normal 2LD on .name: https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/issues/2306
So yes, this TLD’s setup is in fact pretty insane.
I think this says more about how the cookies security model is stupid. They should always have been scoped to the single, exact name they were set from and nothing else. Websites would have had to be designed a bit more thoughtfully.
It seems like it would be easily resolvable with TXT records these days. Anyone could try, say, on www.google.com to set a cookie for all of google.com, and the browser can fetch TXT records on google.com to see what, if any subdomains, it wants to allow this privilege for. Google could return a list or a wildcard; co.uk wouldn't allow any.
In a world without advertising, there's no reason why google.com couldn't also allow *.youtube.com to set cookies for it, but of course that would cause a tremendous privacy freakout. Though in practice they can and do just send every login/logout through a 302 redirect roundtrip to take care of the cookies on youtube.com.
An “administrative structure” seems fine, but the fact that a subdomain gets any sort of privilege over the parent has always seemed absurd to me.
Surely a better solution would involve an actual request. login.foo.com could send a request to foo.com with Origin: login.foo.com asking to set a cookie, and foo.com could make its own decision.
That might be reasonable today, but it's not really reasonable at the time the policies were formed.
If you require domain wide cookies be set from a webserver on the domain apex, the domain apex (for high volume destinations) needs to be set up for high volume webserving. High volume webserving often means at least geotargetted DNS, maybe a CDN, often anycast in today's reality.
Back in the day, it was common for high traffic domains to run their DNS with a normal DNS server and then delegate (typically via CNAME) high volume subdomains off to a 3rd party DNS server for geotargetting (usually Akamai DNS, but there were others). But you can't CNAME the apex domain away. You'd have to delegate the whole domain to your DNS provider and then you have no way to manage an outage of your fancy DNS provider. Especially if you go back to the days where NetworkSolutions did a single daily zone update for .com ... if you wanted to switch to a new DNS provider for your domain, you would submit the change request and hope it happened in the 24 hours, but sometimes you'd miss the window (or there would be some process error) and it would happen much later.
Less of a problem in today's world, where registries typically update the glue records in near real time (although many TLD servers have a 2 day TTL for glue, so you can't switch off a dead provider very quickly) and lots of domains seem comfortable with delegating the whole thing to their CDN.
that seems strange to me: why shouldn't policy leverage name resolution? sort of like dkim, but taken further. for instance, for site.com, I'd much rather retrieve its public key from DNS (some DNS++ version, of course).
> It kind of seems like an insane TLD structure to begin with, right?
It's been around for years. I seem to remember this issue coming up around 2001 where originally .name was for third level registration (i.e. john.doe.name) and changed to second level it a few years later and caused some problems... https://publicsuffix.org/ talks about it in light of architectural limitations of domain names.
> can Joe set a cookie on all of .smith.name?
That can happen. I seem to remember ancient browsers made it so .name (and other non-generic TLDs) required three periods. I think country code domains and new generic TLDS caused the browsers to change it.
It's pretty screwed up, but a lot of the people with .name domains have had them for a very long time. Sad to see them all lose their identity online that way.
So, this kind of thing happens all the time, and there's the Public Suffix List for exactly this problem.
There would be no issue at all if Verisign, or maybe Global Name Registry, decided to stick to the 3rd level registrations exclusively. Problem is, the chucklefucks over there decided it was a good idea to also hand out 2nd level registrations. Those 2nd level registrations outnumber the 3rd level registrations by an order of magnitude, so the PSL decided to just let joe.smith.name and john.smith.name share cookies. Which, IMO, was not a good decision, but it is what it is.
About 20 year ago I registered {lastname}.name and have dozens third level domains below it. So there are "privately owned" second level domains under .name for quite some time...
I'm working on same for my family since I want to properly degoogle a bit. One thing I think long term - if I give my kids first-name @ last name , that means that I forever hold power over their email. Which isn't great. But what's the alternative? Register one full domain name per kid? Even ignoring the cost, the ergonomics are awful.
Imho email is missing a feature for nameless email addresses for when somebody just buys their full name as a domain name. If I get "firstname-lastname.name", having the email be "firstname@firstname-lastname.name' kinda ruins it.
A child born today sees email like we see the telegraph...
they'll grumpily sign up to gmail just so they can get a verification email, and that'll be all it gets used for. Messaging their irl friends will be done in apps like Discord.
lol I ran a sizeable team around 2020 and I had to educate a couple of our new hires straight from college that they actually needed to check their work email, after they missed important HR related stuff and they had just completely not realized it was an avenue for company communication, with an assumption that everything was available on our heavily used slack.
tbh I'm with the zoomers on this one. Work email is 99% junk. Newsletters from every SaaS product we use, "A meeting started", invitations for calendar events that I can just accept ON the calendar, notifications for every transaction on every system ("X posted a comment on Y,") and spam from salespeople, recruiters, etc. And then 1% of it is actionable important stuff that I don't get through Slack.
Email died because of the junk/spam issue. And it's self-fulfilling - when most emails are junk, nobody sends a love-letter or party invitation by email because the recipient probably won't notice it, which in turn lowers the usefulness even further.
If email was a commercial product, the company would have done something about that. Email died because it was an open platform, with nobody to address this systematic issue.
Aside: I'm honestly bewildered that Google doesn't have the ability to handle that in gmail accounts. If somebody gets married or otherwise needs to change their name, their answer is "just make a new google account" when all your stuff is still tied to the old account.
They rolled this out in March this year in the US (and December last year in India).
I've successfully renamed an old account with an email address I no longer liked. It works quite well on everything 1st party, but does have the potential of causing issues with OAuth on poorly-coded websites that key on email instead of user ID (ie. most of them). You do get to keep your old email address though, so it still ends up working fine in practice.
Yes, but you have to admit that the existence of these SLDs (like co.uk) is always going to be a point of confusion for anyone with a basic knowledge of how the domain hierarchy _usually_ works.
Needing to be familiar with all the special cases (like the VERY special case of x.y.name which I previously knew nothing about) kind of ruins everything and introduces yet more security risk.
> but you have to admit that the existence of these SLDs (like co.uk)
I'm sorry, what ? Admit ? Confusion ?
In the case of .co.uk it has been around since 1996. HN is a technical forum, most people here should be well aware it is a serious SLD. I honestly can't believe it even needs clarifying.
Hell, if you use AWS Route 53 you'll see they use co.uk as one of their nameserver suffixes[1].
What does Verisign care though? It's been that way for way over a decade since they started allowing 2LD registrations. I very highly doubt they are suddenly so worried about random individuals' personal internet security.
It has to be a money problem. Something they want to do will be simpler if this is no longer a quirky registry. And they know they'll get the money back that they lose from not having bob.smith pay -- probably by throwing all the "last names" once registered this way into some "premium name" bucket and selling them for $1000 and up instead of the ~$10 that zyzgdhaf234.name fetches.
In fact, I'm not sure that scheme isn't the reason itself.
> The first appearance of reversed DNS strings predated the Internet domain name standards. The UK Joint Academic Networking Team (JANET) used this order in its Name Registration Scheme, before the Internet domain name standard was established. For example, the name `uk.ac.bris.pys.as` was interpreted as a host named `as` within the UK (top level domain .uk)
But I don’t know if uk.co.somethingsomething did or did not exist at that time. Or if it was only introduced after the Internet domain name standards we use today existed and so was .co.uk from the beginning.
In the UK Nominet (the UK domain namr registrar - nic.uk) only permitted 3rd domains - co.uk. org.uk, me.uk. then there were "prove your status" ones such as ltd.uk, plc.uk and ac.uk plus ones like gov.uk, mod.uk, sch.uk, nhs.uk etc.
To me that sounds like reasonable structure. I hold that every single edu, gow and mil domains should be moved under respective ccTLDs. After this sort of move that doesn't seem unreasonable thing.
Agree that the .name 3rd level domains are silly, disagree on .co.uk being a problem.
If .gov and .mil and .com make sense, then .gov.cc and .mil.cc and .com.cc make sense.
Of course, I think having more than one non-cc TLD was a mistake, but that's just me. If it makes sense to have topical TLDs for international and US institutions, it make sense to have national ones.
Nominet and therefore .co.uk has been around since 1996.
.co.uk is not going anywhere, and neither is Nominet.
The only "problem" is the original poster did not do their homework. I suspect they were inferring `uk.co` which is a completely different kettle of fish. The original poster should urgently correct their post.
Ok, co.uk was perhaps a bad example, because it's owned by the same registry as the TLD, but perhaps there are other 2nd level TLDs where that is not the case. My point is both that it's hard to tell, and more broadly why would anyone want their domain to be tacked on to some 3rd level subscript anyway, when there's so many plain top level domains available. Surely most of us (present company excluded perhaps) do not feel so passionately about the reverence of `co.uk`
I don't have some nefarious desire to scare people away from the TLD of their choosing. Really I'm bringing it up to be like "why would you even, like, want some 3rd rate domain instead of getting a .com" so I don't think there's anything to correct
It's not reverence? I think that you're missing that it was a requirement. Basically every country (that followed ICANN's original rules) does this: .com.au, .co.nz, .co.jp, .com.mx, .co.ke (+ the org/net variants for each country)
The US is the only country where registering .com was allowed by ICANN (and not .com.us or something).
ICANN relaxed these rules in the 2010s I think, so now you can register 2LDs at most/all of those country TLDs.
Sovereignty? If you live in the UK, choosing a registry in the UK is a pretty good idea even if they only offered 3rd levels. You’ll have someone to contact and possibly sue locally. Your domain will be subject to UK law and standards, not those of a foreign registry.
Its not hard to tell for things like ".uk" or other serious suffixes.
It only (maybe) becomes hard(er) to tell for all the vanity ccTLDs that came along in the 2000s. But even then 10 seconds on WHOIS and Google should fix any doubt.
> about the reverence of `co.uk`
What are you on about ? Lots of other countries do it too. Japan is one example given already here, but there are dozens. It is very common practice for country tlds.
You're absolutely right, when it's Nominet's actions that actually inspire a lack of trust in .co.uk, given they've been a bit of a hot mess since the early 2010's-ish.
;)
(Edit: although I should add that I'm hopeful that things have improved there over the last few years).
We were rescued from that dot org scam by the fact that ICANN is a California non profit. I wonder if the AG can lean on them again. This is an outrageous thing to do.
MagicMoonlight was [dead]ed for not knowing what "dot org scam" refers to. Since I can't reply there right now and it's not reasonable to expect everyone to know what this refers to:
ICANN, a 501(c)(3), proposed to remove the price cap on .org registration, commonly used for non profits, so PIR, the 501(c)(3) registrar for .org, could then announce it planned to sell .org operations to private equity investment firm Ethos Capital.
Thankfully the overwhelming response caused the proposal to be scrapped.
I wonder how long that'll last. If the regulators in Califonrnia keep forcing them to act in the public's interest, won't they just move to a more favorable jurisdiction?
This is why I am building DNTLS. These organizations no longer deserve our trust and they have inadvertently gained too much power over the last two decades of massive internet expansion. Names need to be fully owned by individuals and a shared, decentralized trust system must be in place for resolution. The more I see actions like this, the more convinced I am that a solution is long overdue.
Yeah, the website is a holdover from when we were pitching AI VCs a few months ago. We quickly determined that the whole system is now "Cancer Capital" (see the other front page HN thread) and have pivoted to just bootstrapping from a close syndicate of like minded individuals. We plan to update the website this month, sorry it's a bit behind.
In short, AI identities were just a happy accident that comes with the system/architecture. It's not tied to AI at all.
But if anyone is interested in talking about what we're doing more, happy to connect at hn@sepositus.com.
Alice registers `alice.dntls` and Bob registers `bob.dntls` on the DNTLS network. During the registration process, they generate PQ key pairs that are registered along with the name. Alice's and Bob's name are hashed before being stored on the network. Bob knows Alice's name, so he can perform the necessary hash computation to look up Alice's public key material on the network. Likewise, Alice can do the same for Bob.
Bob wants to send a file to Alice. Bob takes his name key and signs the document with it and sends it to Alice. Alice looks up Bob's public key material on the network and verifies the signature.
Bob now stands up a new website, but he only wants Alice to access it. He sets up a standard HTTP server but slightly modifies it to be "DNTLS native." He does this by requiring mTLS on incoming TLS connections. The connecting party must identify themselves with a signed certificate. Each name has what we call a "name record" that allows publishing arbitrary metadata signed by the name key. Bob publishes a standard "HTTP" record in his own name record that points to the IP address. Alice now goes to connect to Bob's website. She opens her "special" browser and types in bob's name. The special browser looks up Bob's name record, finds the published IP address, and attempts an mTLS connection. Bob's server is configured to _only_ allow connections from Alice. Since Alice signed her TLS connection with her own name, the connection is allowed, while every other is rejected.
Alice now wants to communicate with Bob's agent. Bob publishes a subname called `agent.bob.dntls`. In that subname's record he publishes an A2A packet that contains the information for connecting to his agent. But, like the website, the agent is listening on a TLS connection that rejects anyone except Alice. She uses an A2A tool to initiate a connection using her name key and is allowed to make a mutually secured connection to Bob's agent.
Bob wants to connect to a VM he purchased that runs the website. He configures SSH with his name key as one of the recognized users. His SSH connection simply leverages the name key to authenticate him to the machine. But he shares the machine with another person and wants to share a secret with them. So he creates a SOPS encrypted file with his name and this other person's names as the only recipients. They both securely access the secret using their respective name keys.
I'll leave it there, but hopefully that's descriptive enough.
The technical implementation aside, "what" prevents this from going down the exact same path as ICANN? E.g. how do we know next year the registration fees won't be 5x or certain registrations denied?
A good question. Unfortunately, all I can say is we have a solution that involves specific European countries, laws, and regulations. As I said in a previous comment, happy to share more outside of this venue, but not all details are 100% public at this point.
Names are not able to be traded, so it's first come first serve. It's impossible to completely defeat name squatting, but you can make it less enticing. In the above case, Alice can "sell" her name to Bob on some aftermarket but the only way to do so is by transferring the cryptographic material. This is fraught with issues, especially considering once Bob has the keys he has no obligation to pay.
Names are valid for one year and range from $10/yr up like current domain names. Letting a name expire opens it back up to being registered again.
We have quite a few other "tools" in play behind the scenes that make name trading/squatting extremely impractical, but I won't go into those details here :)
Like I said, it's impossible to "defeat" it outright because the concept doesn't really lend itself to this sort of structure. If I buy a plaque with my name on it , therefore owning it, the only thing that could really keep me from selling it would be some centralized authority. Even then, black markets have existed for drugs for centuries.
The adoption has basically been non-existent. I have a lot of theories on where they've gone wrong. Being so heavily tied to a blockchain (Ethereum being the worst due to its state bloat) is probably the biggest mistake I think they made.
There's a DNS wizard at my job (not doing DNS stuff currently; but in his past life), and while he was talking to me about certain topics my eyes glazed over, and I thought, "Man, surely that won't affect me, right?"
Well, it's still not affecting me, personally, but wow, seeing articles like this makes it feel just a tiny bit more real.
I don't like the way domains work in general. It's really quite expensive if you are wise enough to buy everything that looks to much like your website.
You're also never going to register e.g. xcombinator.* nor is that necessarily a domain which should never be sold on the basis it's similar to ycombinator.*. Rather than buy everything, buy the ones most likely to be accidentally entered for only the most common tlds so you can set up redirects or the like and then enforce and protect your trademark like you have to in any other situation.
Short-term, it might seem like it would make sense for domain registrations to be permanent, but long-term, it introduces at least two insurmountable problems:
1. Unless some other cleanup mechanism is in place, eventually (like, hundreds of years into the future) domains will need to get longer and longer as people who owned old ones disappear and new people need new ones.
2. The infrastructure costs (while nominal) to keep existing domains functioning would not be sustainable in perpetuity without relying on the assumption of more and more domains always being sold.
> Once the 3rd-level domains are terminated, it is assumed that the now vacant 2nd-level domains will become available for registration. Should someone (other than me) scoop up fraser.name (...)
What's to stop someone from doing that, and keeping the status quo? Sure, it might be expensive, but pool together a few frasers for the initial buy, and make the money back on the sublets.
Well, nothing, but it does assume that Verisign doesn't have an unstated plan to do something else with .name. Domain registration is the real estate of the Internet and very little has happened in the last 30 years of domain name policy that has been for the benefit of anyone outside the the registrars.
For all we know, this is simply the first step in a series of moves for Verisign to better monetize the .name TLD in some novel fashion.
My evidence for this is that Verisign's own arguments for terminating the third-level domains are highly dubious. They claim that the third-level domains are too hard for them to manage. Bollocks: there are only 22,000 of them in use. That is a VERY small database that practically fits on a calculator and I refuse to believe that any manual labor around it is an outsized burden compared to pretty much any other semi-popular TLD. The second claim is that "the majority of those are not in use." Okay, if that's true, then where is the management burden coming from? That means tens of thousands of people are giving them money and getting nothing in return, isn't that the definition of an ideal business model?
It just doesn't pass the sniff test.
And finally, having read both of the linked documents, it sounds like people who have registered their .name for years in the future are not getting their money back. Are they likely to pay a second time, to a sub-registrar with no history?
I worked for .name briefly right at the beginning of their entry into the world. Interesting but very odd part of my career.. Ill give it that.. I personally found the product at first a great idea but somewhat crippled by execution..
From the Verisign application [0] for this change:
> 2.1. What effect, if any, will the proposed service have on the life cycle of domain names?
> None. There will not be any effect on the life cycle of domain names.
ehhh, how is that possibly true? This change (deleting all third level names) by definition affects the lifecycle of domain names ... by terminating them!
Many years ago I wrote articles bringing attention to the negative effects of Verisign's SiteFinder [1] - if you don't remember this, it's when Verisign hijacked NXDOMAIN by redirecting any unresolvable domain to a site they owned and controlled.
"Well, it doesn't affect the lifecycle of domain names. The lifecycle is defined in some RFC somewhere, and this change doesn't modify that. Now, these particular domain name instances might be adversely affected, but you didn't ask about that." -- lawyers, probably.
You're closer than you think. Big companies and institutions just change the definition of words they don't like. In this case, they could argue that a domain's lifecycle is registration, renewal (optional), deletion. Deletion is part of the expected lifecycle, so this doesn't change it.
The ambiguity is a feature so they can do whatever they want. We all know it's bullshit, but it gives the parties involved the ability to disenfranchise one group to benefit another while claiming they're following the rules.
Wow! Years ago I initially bought my firstname.lastname.name, then I let it expire and then bought lastname.name. So glad I did!
Never dreamed that such a supposedly durable thing would just disappear. How hard is it really to preserve a global resource like this that exists only in software?
One of the reasons I stick with Big Email for my primary email is cases similar to this. If I host email and lose the domain one day, I’ve lost two factor on a thousand different services (the single factor on some). Big Email’s policy is to not reissue my address, should I lose it or die.
The .name scenario is even worse. One domain gives you access to tens of thousands of users email. It seems like a privacy nightmare.
I’m not sure how future auth and privacy will work, but my child lost a tracfone phone and some mixup had separated it from my account. There was no way to recover the number. If that was my personal phone, how difficult would it be to restore banking, medical, and government access to things that assume I’ll always have that number.
Doing the same with personal email seems like too big of a risk.
The risk of losing your big email account is higher than losing your domain.
Furthermore, if you happen to lose your domain, it will in most cases be easier to recover than a restricted account.
Came to the same conclusion. With primary email I do not need multiple points of failure. The optimal solution is a contractual - paid - relationship with a single reputable email provider. There are a bunch of them.
You can look through my history how many times I’ve brought this up to people and they just don’t seem to care. A defence is that they’ll buy the domain for a century and not care once they’re dead which is fair but the situation in this article is a valid one. I will always stick with Big Email for accounts.
I moved to a third-level .name domain in 2005 precisely because one of the Big Email providers (Google) locked me out of my account with no recourse; presumably because I had a very common email address that was getting a large number of login attempts from other people which had triggered some abuse automation.
At the time - before the explosion of new gLTDs - third-level .name domains were advertised as the 'correct' domain to register for individuals wanting personal email addresses.
I think it's pretty reasonable. The percentage of email accounts Google & Microsoft terminate seems far far lower than the chance I misconfigure my email or lose my domain
If you walk around all day with your wallet in your pocket, it might fall out and you'll lose it. Would you like me to hold onto it for you to make sure that doesn't happen?
I was talking about one of those. Specifically they have a policy of not reissuing email addresses. Once it’s registered it’s burned. If they were to reverse that policy, the sky would fall.
"2.1. What effect, if any, will the proposed service have on the life cycle of domain names?
None. There will not be any effect on the life cycle of domain names.
...
2.3. Explain how the proposed service will affect the throughput, response time,
consistency or coherence of responses to Internet servers or end systems.
There will be no effect on the throughput, response time, consistency or coherence of responses to Internet servers or end systems."
My registrar is also suggesting that they are going to just keep the money I pre-paid for years of registration, which is a minor annoyance compared to the loss of my entire online identity but an annoyance nonetheless.
Since ICANN is a non-profit that is required to operate in the public interest I do hope there can be some pushback on this. I will be writing to the CA AG myself.
I've had a .name domain forever and I had no idea first.last.name was even a thing, meaning that it was possible to register this without owning last.name.
That said, my domain is simply unusual.name, and everybody in my family has email addresses in the form first@unusual.name. So this is a no-op for me, and I gather www.unusual.name will also continue to work, since I own the 2nd level outright.
I'm sure Verisign would be thrilled to have a bidding war between the legitimate owners of fraser.name and a bunch of third parties they suddenly enabled.
This is silly question, but is your family managing trust in you as lone guy - cousin, father, brother - having potentially access to all their emails?
I feel that I more trust some corpo (Google, etc) that one particular person.
I don't imagine setup where you can effictevely guarantee them full privacy.
Some people in my family use it as their main address, others don't, it's entirely their call.
But yes, ultimately I control the domain and could be nefarious if I wanted to. But there's a certain baseline level of trust as a family, I'm reasonably certain my wife won't poison the milk in the fridge and she's reasonably certain I'm not going to read her emails.
> This is silly question, but is your family managing trust in you as lone guy - cousin, father, brother - having potentially access to all their emails?
I believe this is a very common setup: the "computer wizard" kid of the family manages the computers for the whole family. Not just emails, they have access to the whole computer (and have to fix when it breaks).
I manage the email accounts for the others in my household because it's free for them and I'm happy to do it. Plus, they trust me more than they trust a random tech company. Maybe that is not a universal thing among all families or parts of the world.
The implication, that one should make a plan for that, is a valid reminder not enough of us probably do.
But it hardly needs to be difficult. If you're running dovecot and postfix on a server somewhere then yes, family is screwed. But it's simple to use either some mail forwarding service that you pay for with a credit card, or something like fastmail (etc). Leave 2 pages of instructions for how to log into and renew the domain (print the QR code used for the 2fa enrollment!) and how to log in and pay for whatever the underlying services are. Place in a binder and label "Family.Name Email Management" and put it with your other important documents.
But more seriously, my domain and VPS is on auto-pay, so it doesn't just shut off the day I die. My survivors will have plenty of time to back up their emails and do whatever they want with them afterward.
Plus, the password for my computers and keychain is in a safe-deposit box if they feel like handing it over to a trusted tech-savvy friend of the family to shut down properly.
It was deemphasized pretty early because people didn't understand it.
It made sense to us because our starting point was an email service letting people share lastname.sometld, but we never got close to as many registrants on .name as we had users on the webmail service (we had a couple of million accounts on that when it was sold to one of Marc Cubans companies for a relative pittance in the aftmath of the dot com bubble bursting)
If this proves to be a viable business strategy, then verisign could equally use it to re-sell google.com, ycombinator.com, etc. to the highest bidder.
I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that this is the most careless, disruptive change to anything to do with DNS or internet names I have ever seen.
> "will increase efficiency for the operation of the .name TLD."
What a preposterous excuse -- especially for something already up and running. Sounds like they probably want to change the backend in some way - or adopt some kind of off-the-shelf software - which doesn't jive so well with this unique TLD, and they figure "Ehh, fuck 'em, let's just pull the plug on these tens of thousands of people."
I thought I knew a lot about the policies and expectations when it comes to domains. I was surprised to see 3rd level domains called out in the .name registry agreement and I’m stunned that ICANN allowed this.
It’s incredibly one sided. The registry gets to cut costs and the detriment to registrants is extreme. ICANN is supposed to act on behalf of all participants.
The flagrant disregard for DNS stability in this case is jaw dropping.
I think the “not applicable” is to the elided second sentence of the question:
> 3.6. Have you communicated with any of the entities whose products or services might be affected by the introduction of your proposed service? [→ No.] If so, please describe the communications. [→ Not applicable.]
Gotta say that the entire form feels not applicable. The proposed service is the discontinuation of an existing service. I see from their website that other similar things do the same, but it feels broken when so many of the questions become nonsense.
> 2.1. What effect, if any, will the proposed service have on the life cycle of domain names?
> None. There will not be any effect on the life cycle of domain names.
If they're dropping existing domain names, that seems like it has an effect on the life cycle of those domain names. I suspect I must be misunderstanding what they mean by that question, because it otherwise seems like it shouldn't have passed basic muster.
In this case the registry itself (Verisign) was the owner of the second-level domain, and they most certainly shouldn't be allowed to just drop your registration whenever they please.
Ok I don’t get it. Why not register `fraser.nameˋ directly? Or pick any TLD and register ˋ a 2nd-level domain (ˋfraser.tld`)? It just feels easier, plus this way you don’t have to pay for any new member of your family?
> Or pick any TLD and register ˋ a 2nd-level domain (ˋfraser.tld`)?
How would that help? The problem is that he's losing access to all the accounts currently tied to fraser.name, if he is changing that he can just use any arbitrary domain anyways.
The post sounds like that wasn't possible; that this TLD operated by exception with third-level domains. It would be like asking why you don't just register smith.uk instead of smith.co.uk: because you can't (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk#Second-level_domains)
That's just my reading of the situation though. The person could now hope they're the first to claim their second-level domain once it becomes up for grabs, but there's probably a dozen other people with a fraser subdomain that would want the same, plus however many hundreds of scalper scum. Probably the best you can hope for is that whoever does get it, has the decency to honor the original third-level domains for a reasonable fee
Because only one lucky person can own `fraser.name` at any one time in your model. And whilst that lucky person might be able to register their family members for free. There will be countless more (unrelated) Frasers who won't be able to register (even for money) their own `FIRST.fraser.name`.
So the argument goes, society as a whole gains more if we prevent anyone from owning `fraser.name`.
A legitimate alternative though, is to register `FIRST-fraser.name`
At the beginning of the existence of the .name TLD you couldn't do that, you were forced to register firstname.lastname.name and provide an ID to justify registering this specific domain.
With it you got an email redirection from firstname@lastname.name to the address of your choice. At some point this feature was discontinued (I assume when VeriSign took control of the .name TLD), a bit after it was decided (again by VeriSign) to allow registering first level .name domain. My main email address stopped working from one day to another without me being warned in any way.
When this happened I've emailed VeriSign and my registrar at the time, and tried several time since then, to be able to register the first level domain I'm the only one using, but they categorically refuse, despite recognizing that a single subdomain has ever been registered. They kept saying that I could just let the domain expire, wait for the grace period, and register it once it's liberated, hoping that no one does it before me, and without any solution for the downtime in the mean time…
This really sounds like VeriSign has no business owning .name … best possible outcome would be transferring it to somebody who will retain the originally intended services.
What a perfect example of the sort of fuckery Verisign would do. You have the simplest use case and they can't even help you transition onto the scheme THEY WANT everyone to use now.
Dude, this is one of the craziest things I think I've read on HN
First, that a legit dealer could/did(does?) sell third-level domains at all (Verisign, no less)
Second, that the top-level is staying available, allowing for second-levels to be bought/sniped like you mention.
If you do lawyer up and need help with legal fees, I think this would be a worthy cause.
You might want to write to the CA attorney general. Former AG Xavier Becerra was able to dissuade ICANN from letting the .org fuckery happen, maybe Bonta could try to strong arm ICANN in this case.
EDIT: seems like Ethos Capital private equity firm wanted the .org registry, and Xavier Becerra (Attorney General of California at the time) wrote a letter that played major role in transaction being rejected
> Dear Messrs. Botterman and Marby:
>
> I urge ICANN to reject the transfer of control over the .ORG registry to Ethos Capital.
> The proposed transfer raises serious concerns that cannot be overlooked.
> Second, my email address also disappears. Third, all the IoT devices that use services on this domain become bricks. Basically, I disappear from the Internet.
While changing email is inconvenient, I don't understand the point about IoT devices. IoT devices should not depend on the Internet at all for obvious privacy and security reasons. If you are using IoT devices with "cloud" accounts, then this is a blessing in disguise. Put that garbage in the trash and rebuild around HomeAssistant, Zigbee, RTSP, etc. I find it hard to believe that someone hosting their own website would fall for the cloud IoT scam.
Plenty of people and businesses have their own (DIY, etc) devices that need to use DNS. I mean it wouldn't really be the internet of things, if it didn't actually use the internet...
For instance, I own a .house domain that I use for a bunch of stuff that I've programmed. It would be a pain in the ass to go change that domain out. Now take that to next level and you're a business that's deployed a few thousand devices that need to call home.
I guess all this is to say - IoT doesn't just mean cheap botnet honeypot IP cameras. Take a look at https://www.balena.io/cloud for instance
"Internet" in this context usually means IP, and in any case it should be restricted to a LAN. If you actually own the device changing the domain or IP should be trivial, I don't think this is what the article refers to.
He didn't say his IoT devices relied on 'cloud' accounts. He said there are IoT that use services on this domain.
Imagine he's set up some IoT devices at his parents' home, and those devices use services that he hosts somewhere on the internet. It would be silly to hard code the IP addresses in there, right (unless he operates his own ASN)? So he would use DNS to allow those devices to find his server(s). This would be the case whether the servers are at his home, at his office, or in a rack at a data centre.
> In April 2019, ICANN proposed an end to the price cap of .org domains and effectively removed it in July in spite of having received 3,252 opposing comments and only six in favor. A few months later, the owner of the domain, the Public Interest Registry, proposed to sell the domain to investment firm Ethos Capital. After intense criticism from nonprofit groups and significant figures in Internet history, the proposal was scrapped.
Surprisingly not by Verisign, who gave up .org in 2003.
The ability to register fraser.geek so a very small number of OpenNIC users can access that new URL doesn't really solve the OP's problem with his family's long-established URLs disappearing and their emails being directed to whichever scammer buys up the fraser.name domain.
That isn't the correct problem. The 3rd level domain is going away, which can be reconqured via OpenNIC and mass re-adoption. There will surely be new problems, but owning will not be among those problems.
That's why you form leverage with 22k others that are in the same boat as you. The root with the users is the root that becomes trusted, which then becomes the root that resolves. Rolling-over and allowing ICANN to quietly get away with this is exactly what they want.
I wonder if this could constitute a violationiof article 6 of the UN declaration of human rights.
It has been established that national identifiers are protected by it, and a domain works as a sort of international identifier, in this case a personal one.
No one is obligated to give you a domain, but by contracting an obligation to provide that identifier until 2040, they would at least be liable for those damages, but there's an argument that depriving you of an identifier already granted is a more fundamental violation of a right to a name, an identifier and recordkeeping of them.
That's pretty shit. You'd think changes like this would need to go through a public comment period with the affected users (much like city planning decisions do)
So, where is our fully decentralized TLD alternative, free of ICANN or any central authority to handle how we grant names by conventions, without any money scheme in the game that attracts malevolent actors moving only through greed strings?
Also, this time let’s make it like usenet, so "person:named:Neil Fraser" or even "::Neil Fraser" (harder to type but less culturally entangled into English).
> So, where is our fully decentralized TLD alternative, free of ICANN or any central authority to handle how we grant names by conventions, without any money scheme in the game that attracts malevolent actors moving only through greed strings?
We can all edit our hosts file.
The problem with a lack of a central authority is domain names are most useful if they follow the highlander principle. There can only be one neil.fraser.name ... otherwise it's not usable for routing traffic if every webserver a Neil Fraser runs uses that address. (Yes, there are useful ways for one name to resolve to different webservers, but almost always those are webservers under at least loose control of a single entity or very exceptional cases)
Consider whether you'd be questioning this if the author had written that within minutes of his daughter being born, her photo was on Facebook. The only thing it suffers from is not being normalized and taking marginally more* effort, while being nowhere nearly as creepy.
* or arguably the same amount or less; for additional context: the author is an ex-Googler
To be faiiiir, when your partner is absolutely zonked out in the minutes post-delivery, what else is there to do when you're by their side and still half-asleep? Time to start announcing your pride and joy to the world, starting with a domain zone file.
I even suspect that the name of the child was dependent on the domain name being free... but then, it shouldn't be too hard to set up the request in advance and just press the button once the child is born. Maybe there was some rule that names could only be registered for living (i.e., born) persons?
Pretty crazy to be focused on anything other than your immediate family in after a birth... but not exactly unprecedented when you look at social media posts!
I mean, you've already had 10 months to come up with some name ideas. It's not like it's a huge surprise when it happens. You could even register the names before they're born.
I thought there might have been a need to send an ID to prove that you actually have the name you're registering for so you would need to wait for the birth certificate but from wikipedia it doesn't seem like that's the case.
No requirements at all. My mom had registered my firstlast.com domain some 30 years ago. While caring for my dying dad, she let all her domain registrations expire. I then had to negotiate with a domain squatter to get my domain back.
The correct way to handle this mess is to simply keep things messy. BGP tables are a big mess, for example, because a lot of companies keep their IPs when going from ISP to ISP.
But, assuming that Verisign can’t keep third level domains (as a DNS implementer, I don’t think third level domains is a huge deal; see thread below):
* Third level names where only one person has the second level domain should be transferred to whoever owns that single third level name.
* Third level names where multiple people have the same second level domain should be put up for closed bidding: Only current owners of .name domains with a given second level domain name (e.g. last name) will be able to bid for the second-level domain. So, if one has john.smith.name and joe.smith.name, Joe Smith and John Smith will be in a bidding war for smith.name.
If the issue of .name not being in public suffix is a real issue, Verisign can handle that by disabling new third-level .name registrations, and provide Public Suffix with a list of those registrations (just send all the owners a privacy notice, making it clear that the existence of the name will be made public for security reasons). More reading: https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/issues/2306 (There seems to be issues with this list being too long to keep in the Public Suffix because there’s too much software out there which can’t handle it. That seems strange to me: Even here in 2026 where RAM costs far too much, Deadwood can store a list of 240,000 blacklisted entries in under 10 megs; there are about 22,000 three-level .name domains and I could store that list in a way that could be very quickly looked up in about a meg of memory)
Now, personally, I think Verisign can keep these messy third level names, and are doing things this way so that Neil Fraser has to compete with every single 2-bit cybersquatter out there for the rights to fraser.name.
As an aside, it’s trivial to have DNS servers handle multi-level domains without having to have a zone file for every level; e.g. https://this.is.a.long.name.maradns.org works, and there’s no zone file for name.maradns.org, long.name.maradns.org, a.long.name.maradns.org, and so on.
The auction plan is gross. It is unfair to say "This thing you thought you were buying the right to exclusively control (subject to continued renewal payments)? We're gonna transfer it next week to whichever Fraser pays us the most. Happy bidding!" It wouldn't be any more fair to do that than to announce to all .com owners that there will now be an auction between them and everyone who ever typed that name into a search at the registrar.
As a DNS implementer, the action plan is unnecessary. There are, what, only 22,000 or so .name domains. One can write code to do two lookups for firstname.lastname.name: If firstname.lastname.name is found, return the NS delegation. Otherwise, if lastname.name is found, return that NS delegation. Finally, if neither is found, return NXDOMAIN.
One argument is that this is hard to implement in the real world (it’s about one day, at most one week for a skilled DNS developer to pull off; probably half a day to be honest, and yes I have written code like this), so then yeah if that’s a real concern let’s have a closed auction. I’m opposed to the auction, based on my experience that this isn’t hard to implement.
If it’s an issue, just stop all new firstname.lastname.name registrations, and only allow lastname.name new registrations. Then we only need to deal with this corner case for about 22,000 domains, which we can keep in a special hash and would take about four megs to store.
I wrote to ICANN support and got a template-AI answer wholly unrelated to my complaint about this:
”Greetings from ICANN Global Support.
I am sorry to hear you are experiencing this domain access issue after your registrar's transfer. I will happy to provide you with relevant information and guidance.
Please note that, ICANN accredits companies as domain name registrars and works to ensure contractual compliance with the terms and conditions of the 2009 and 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreements (RAAs).
ICANN does not provide domain name registration or manage domain accounts. As a result of that ICANN is not able to perform domain management for you.
If you need help to access and manage your domain, you will need to contact your domain service provider or registrar for assistance.
You may check who your registrar is by doing a domain search at lookup.icann.org.”
That's 22k people with third level domains like first.last.name. There are close to 100,000 second level last.name registrations, which are not going anywhere.
Surely the author must have anticipated some heightened level of risk in pegging important parts of his personal and business life on a nonstandard TLD like this.
It's a pretty bizarre exception to the normal, intuitive ways that domains work.
I'll admit that it's a crappy situation and I would be frustrated in his place. But if I were in his place, I probably would have also thought it prudent to have a backup plan.
What exactly is non-standard about an ICANN-approved TLD? Yes, the multi-level structure is a little odd, but given that ICANN approved it in the first place, one has a reasonable expectation that they would work as advertised.
Non-standard as in "it's not up to my usual standards" not "is not part of a technical standard". I.e. it's a gTLD rather than a "standard" (in the previous sense) TLD.
Even though .science was launched in 2014 (more than a decade ago), I still consider it a non-standard TLD and still deal regularly with difficulties around its use. (For instance, you wouldn't believe how many online services reject email addresses than end in .science because they use regexes that exclude TLDs with 7 letters.)
Likewise, I've registered .lol and .fun domains but never would have assumed that just because they're available now, they will be available in perpetuity.
In that sense, .name as a third-level TLD is even more non-standard, because the standard way domain registration works is by choosing a single "second level" domain name, then adding subdomains.
> Likewise, I've registered .lol and .fun domains but never would have assumed that just because they're available now, they will be available in perpetuity.
Why wouldn't you assume this?
> the standard way domain registration works is by choosing a single "second level" domain name, then adding subdomains
The entire ccTLD systems of the UK, China, Germany, France, Japan, and many others would beg to differ.
I don't think those are comparable, because when you register a .co.uk domain, you are selecting one name that precedes .co.uk, similar to how you register one name that precedes .com.
Whereas with .name, you are choosing what appears to be a subdomain, followed by what appears to be a domain name. But under the hood, you do not own all subdomains for that domain name; you own only the combination of first_name.last_name.name.
I'm not sure I understand. How is registering first.last.name not also selecting one name ("first") that precedes last.name, similar to how you register one name that precedes .com?
(And yes, I am aware that you can also register last.name by itself, but only if there are no third-level domains using it, so for practical purposes it doesn't change my question above. Plus, when the OP originally purchased his domain, you could only buy third-level domains for .name.)
Present these two domain names to the average person:
1) benedict.cumberbatch.name
2) drstrange.co.uk
I expect the average person would assume that for the domain 1, .name is the TLD, cumberbatch.name is registered by a private entity, and benedict (and any other subdomains associated with cumberbatch.name) is a subdomain fully controlled by that private entity.
Whereas for domain 2, I think the average person will view ".co.uk" the same way they view ".com", even though technically it is both a ccTLD and a second-level domain.
I mean, we could say much the same of any other non-country TLD, and probably half the country TLDs. That doesn’t mean one shouldn’t expect it to be administered responsibly
.name is in no way a "nonstandard TLD." It has been in existence for a quarter of a century and was part of the first batch of new gTLDs approved after the dot-com boom had begun, in 2000.
For the first couple of years of .name's existence, it only allowed registration of third-level domains, and the ability to register second-level domains was added later (and only if no third-level domains existed for that second-level domain).
The author is in no way at fault here, and I don't think I would have assumed there was a heightened level of risk if I were him.
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