.name Termination

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

.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?

[0] https://publicsuffix.org/

> 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...

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.

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).

The main issue here is the way VeriSign and ICANN are operating. Unchecked, hostile, and without consequences (even the ombudsman okay the move). Someone might come along and say but you can always fight in the court - and that's the problem! Some company or entity claims one of those .net/.com domains I "use" and just gets us suspended and handed over, as someone not living in the USA I will literally be out of any option. This "then go to the court" is a very dangerous setting. We all know this but this squarely rigged to be in favour of the offenders with means and power.

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.

There is no subdomain/TLD bit

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.

> 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

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.

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.

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.

https://publicsuffix.org/

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

Different from .co.uk.

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.

.uk was opened up relatively recently.

Quirky stuff like .co.uk / .org.uk / .sch.uk 2nd level domains partly come around from .uk being the worlds first CCTLD outside the US (and as other parts of this thread say, .us isn't that popular a CCTLD).

Everything was new and different people tried different hierarchy and structures to 2LD and 3LD's. .co.uk is also far from unique, I know this is common in many other places (UK/NZ/IN/ZA/KR/MX).

The UK now allows directy foo.uk registrations as well, but many people still have SLD's registered and will continue to do so.

But I agree it makes no sense for public sales to the wider world such as `co.uk`. At least have the registrar be the govt company register and hand out subdomains to each registered company.

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?

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.)

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.

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.

   Risk: none
   Rollback plan: N/A

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?

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.

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 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 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)

> 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

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

> 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.

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)

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

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...)

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

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.

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

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

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.

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`

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 -_-

* or arguably the same amount or less; for additional context: the author is an ex-Googler

What they should do, is nothing.

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

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.

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.