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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.

It seems insane because it seems like a big point was to have a permanent site for your name. This just devalues all domain names, showing that they can do a rug-pull at any time because they don't want to manage it (how about turn it over to a private company that can adjust costs so they can make a profit and keep it running?).

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.

> the right thing they should do

Can someone explain why a product "registered and paid for until 2040" can be unilaterally voided like this without compensation?

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.

Having a mix of both 2LD and 3LD registrations under the same TLD is a bit of a nightmare in terms of public-suffix list [0], which is kind of important thing when enrolling your domain for some services, cloudflare among them.

[0] https://publicsuffix.org/

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?

In the tech industry of yore, corporations having tech ecosystem stewardship duties was a quaint necessary evil to placate the developer crowd so you could hire them. Today, c-suites consider that indulgent soft-hearted hippie nonsense utterly gauche.

It's been through the Ombuds and a reconsideration request [1]. ICANN says:

> There will not be any effect on the life cycle of domain names. While the Requestor may disagree with Verisign’s response, the Requestor has not shown that ICANN relied upon false or inaccurate material information. The life cycle of a domain name begins when the domain is registered, then moves through various stages before ultimately coming to a close. Early termination of a domain registration does not impact the life cycle of the domain, as the domain can still go through the various stages of a standard life cycle. Moreover, as stated above, ICANN was aware that discontinuation of these registry services in the .NAME gTLD would result in the termination of approximately 22,000 third-level domain registrations and of email services/addresses.

I don't agree. If I have a domain registered for 10 years the expected life cycle is for deletion to occur 10 years from now, not 90 days from now. They've changed the life cycle by changing the agreed upon deletion date for the current registration term.

I could maybe see if they stop accepting renewals and delete the domains as they expire. It's not a good look, but at least people are getting what they've been promised.

1. https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/reconsideration-26-2-s...

Sorry, I don't understand this rule, would someone kindly explain?

I own lastname.name and use it for email only like this: firstname@lastname.name

I always thought as owner of lastname.name, I'm the only one able to add subdomain.lastname.name. Is this wrong??

1) Can anyone "buy" scam.lastname.name without my authorization on .name??

2) Can anyone owning not.lastname.name then steal my emails going to: firstname@*.lastname.name or even firstname@lastname.name??

BUT: If someone ONLY bought not.lastname.name and doesn't own lastname.name, they'll get terminated. Would that be 'good' as it would stop 1) and 2) ??

I'm really concerned. My family is using first@lastname.name as the personal email, I'm hosting and paying for since many years.

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).

Yea. Super confused.

I have myname .name - so I thought that was going away. Granted I barely use it, but still it would be annoying. I didn't recall there were 3rd level domains there.

I don't get the difference. If I acquire the y domain and make it work as a subdomain broker, it's the same thing no?

There is no subdomain/TLD bit

It's the same reason I was nervous moving our company domain to a .ai TLD; your entire presence, identity and trust is now beholden to the whims and political winds of a Caribbean island smaller than Topeka.

Can you share how the discovery worked?

"Online identity" seems like a castle built on quicksand in every single case.

What's your account tied to?

E-mail? That's usually on a mail server owned by someone else. If not, it's still on a domain owned by someone else.

Phone number? Definitely owned by someone else.

The only account that's reliably "yours" is one that asks for a login, a password, maybe a TOTP, and absolutely nothing else. Because everything else is introducing "things owned by a third party" into the equation.

.co.uk is run by the same people as .uk. There is no additional org that you trust when you register a .co.uk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.uk#Second-level_domains

> do browsers have a wildcard suffix list

Yes: https://publicsuffix.org/ and they have discussed this situation here: https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/issues/2306

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.

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.

Nobody owns the .co part of .co.uk. If you buy foo.co.uk, that is registered with Nominet, who are the registry for .uk.

> 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.

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...

Surprisingly the public suffix list doesn't list `*.name`. So they're indeed not properly isolated from each other.

https://publicsuffix.org/

edit: apparently not all second level domains in .name are public suffixes anymore, so a wildcard addition wouldn't be correct.

Note that the posted link talks about .uk.co, which currently does not exist but I guess may have in the past. Where .co is the ccTLD of Colombia.

Different from .co.uk.

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.

.uk was opened up relatively recently.

.uk.co (mentioned in the blog) isn't .co.uk

It wasn't obviously wrong in 2001. .pro started with a similar structure around the same time.

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.

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.

> ICANN is a California non profit

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 the comment I was looking for. Thank you

Sure. We have this for countries, like "example.co.uk", so I made "name" be a country and it...just works (maybe).

You only get a first name and a last name and a .name though. You can't be robert.louis.stevenson.name - just louis.stevenson.name.

(Incidentally, this was a Claude suggestion. The change only took a couple minutes but figuring out what mechanism in the code could do this would have taken me a lot longer.)

Amen to this. I don't know why we put up with this for infrastructure in particular.

Never heard of DNTLS, thanks for sharing. I skimmed the Website and am a bit uncertain what the ai angle is. Shouldnt naming be, well, just naming?

the only real way to have a decentralized domain system is something like https://github.com/pubky/pkarr

but you lose the ability to have short domains.

also until such a time that pkarr is widely adopted, you are better off using .onion domains anyway. it becomes a question of requiring custom DNS client vs. Tor browser.

both approaches use a DHT.

There is already ENS.

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?

Depends on how much one trusts whoever's running fraser.name. Is it more or less than Verisign?

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 don’t see the problem if you stick with .com or the ccTLD for the country you live in.

To me, the risk these registries screwing me over is smaller than Big Email deciding I broke their ToS and shutting down my account.

I wouldn’t use these novel TLDs either.

By Big Email are you just referring to the biggest providers (e.g. Google and Microsoft)? or is there another meaning?

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.

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.

one neat thing having your own domain lets you do is have ANY <string>@domainyouown be sent to your inbox so this gives you unlimited email aliases. I often prefix the SOURCE of the email, like toyota@domainIown

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.

> Expiring domains is bad for the web

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.

That document looks like the change tickets I see at work when investigating internal outages:

   Risk: none
   Rollback plan: N/A

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49558150

"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.

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.

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)

I think it was figure of speech. The domain is registered until 2036

> Registry Expiration: 2036-01-29 00:00:00 UTC Updated: 2026-09-03 08:12:27 UTC Created: 2002-01-23 14:41:45 UTC

it's probably a 10 year registration, plus a pre-paid renewal at the registrar

No, we were in fact part of the very first batch of "new" TLDs

Agreed. If you don't want to care about backwards compatibility, there's plenty of space for you in tech. Just not at a domain registry!!

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.

Seriously.

  > 7.3. Provide any other relevant information to include with the request. If none, respond with “N/A.”
  > None.

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.

This is how you fill out an application when you know it's going to be rubber-stamped.

I caught this one:

> 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.

The nerve.

Based on my understanding of the situation, the 2LDs are getting sold, so yes, you should try to acquire the 2LD if you want to retain control of your subdomain(s).

If aaa.bbb.name is registered, then bbb.name cannot be registered.

bbb.name can ONLY be registered if it is not already registered AND there are no 3rd levels registered on bbb.name currently.

https://manage.whois.com/kb/servlet/KBServlet/faq1485.html

> 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.

There will other people with the Fraser surname in the exact same position.

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…

And now this… fuck VeriSign -_-

What was the deal with .org?

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.

(from https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/correspondence/becerra-to...)

I wonder which tech nonprofit would be best to champion this cause. Doesn't seem quite the EFF's domain.

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.

.org almost got screwed in 2019 too:

> 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.

Those are all controlled by companies in and subject to the demands of the USA, which has been proving for many years that they cannot be trusted.

Also, all common names with any of those prefixes have been registered a long time ago.

What does Paramount have to do with the last name Frazer?

Family of ESR or who is this?

May I ask what is wrong with Verisign?

Per TFA, that won't be necessary for much longer.

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.

> 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)

Namecoin (.bit) was an attempt to create naming system without a central authority using a blockchain.

But from what I remember, they fucked up the pricing function and it got overrun by domain grabbers.

Don't want to get scooped by GoDaddy when they hear the good news.

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?

Maybe they wanted the Created Date for the domain to match the birth date.

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.

He didn’t say how many minutes.

It was more than one minute.

just a figure of speech

Priorities. /s

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.

What they should do, is nothing.

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.

https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/name-2014-03-03-en

According to Wikipedia, "Verisign was the outsourced operator for .name since the .name launch in 2002". That makes the reasoning yet more puzzling.

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

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.

It sounds to me like you understand the point perfectly well, you just cared to make a different point.

Anything other than .com, .net, .org, and well-known ccTLDs I see in search results subconsciously get skipped over as "probably SEO spam or other useless content". These new weird TLDs are like the .tk and .us of old.

> nonstandard TLD

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.

.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.