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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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 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).
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 ..name which I previously knew nothing about) kind of ruins everything and introduces yet more security risk.
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.
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.
1. The Nominet rules are crystal clear about which 2LDs are managed by Nominet[1] (co.uk, sch.uk, gov.uk etc. etc.). `co.uk` has been a Nominet managed 2LD since 1996 and it is not going anywhere.
2. FUN FACT ... Nominet introduced the ability to register directly under `.uk` much, much later, in 2014. Before 2014 your only option was to register under the auspices of a Nominet managed 2LD, e.g. `co.uk`. Ownership of a third-party 2LD is validated in 10 seconds via the usual WHOIS.
I suspect you meant 'uk.co' and other such shenanigans. Please correct your post accordingly.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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..
> 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 that has happened in the last 30 years of domain name policy 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?
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?
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.
"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).
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)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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 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)
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
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!
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 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.
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.
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.)
.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.
.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?
Still a crappy thing for people, but it does not affect owned second-level domains.
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).
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?
> 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
> 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.
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...
IIRC orgs like letsencrypt also use the PSL for rate limits, so there are probably more issues that are not browser-based.
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.
Maybe it could be opt-in or opt-out via some markers at the DNS level, though? The public suffix list having to exist at all is bizarre.
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.
And that's one reason why the public-ness of a hierarchy level belongs on a DNS record on that level and not some separately-distributed side list.
I mean: why not have cookie policy set by a flag in DNS? Not unlike DKIM or even SSHFP.
Of course, we wouldn't need the entire certificate industry if we simply looked up a site's PK along with its DNS record...
Yup. The original statement was dangerous FUD which should be urgently corrected.
Needing to be familiar with all the special cases (like the VERY special case of ..name which I previously knew nothing about) kind of ruins everything and introduces yet more security risk.
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.
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.
Different from .co.uk.
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.
https://publicsuffix.org/
edit: apparently not all second level domains in .name are public suffixes anymore, so a wildcard addition wouldn't be correct.
What the hell are you talking about ?
1. The Nominet rules are crystal clear about which 2LDs are managed by Nominet[1] (co.uk, sch.uk, gov.uk etc. etc.). `co.uk` has been a Nominet managed 2LD since 1996 and it is not going anywhere.
2. FUN FACT ... Nominet introduced the ability to register directly under `.uk` much, much later, in 2014. Before 2014 your only option was to register under the auspices of a Nominet managed 2LD, e.g. `co.uk`. Ownership of a third-party 2LD is validated in 10 seconds via the usual WHOIS.
I suspect you meant 'uk.co' and other such shenanigans. Please correct your post accordingly.
[1]https://nominet.uk and https://www.nominet.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/UK-rules-o...
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
5 seconds on wikipedia or google would have stopped them spreading completely dangerous FUD about .co.uk.
Implying lack of trust in `co.uk`
Implying `co.uk` may suffer the same fate at `.name`
Complete FUD.
;)
(Edit: although I should add that I'm hopeful that things have improved there over the last few years).
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.
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.
Well, it's still not affecting me, personally, but wow, seeing articles like this makes it feel just a tiny bit more real.
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.
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?
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?
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.
[0] https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/consensus-policies/rsep-2... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_Finder
[1] https://blog.asmartbear.com/free-markets-bad/
Gotta wonder what other possible disasters introduced with gTLDs.
How is this possible? I thought there was a 10 year limit.
> 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
"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.
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 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.
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).
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)
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.
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
You can. Anyone can register a .uk, and you don't need to own the .co.uk
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 -_-
> 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.
Overall this seems like the right move, either they all are trusted or none.
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.
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.
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.
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...)
> 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.
it'd fit like a PE firm focusing on chemical weapons
Also, all common names with any of those prefixes have been registered a long time ago.
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).
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.
”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.”
Absolutely infuriating
...minutes?
* or arguably the same amount or less; for additional context: the author is an ex-Googler
I don't know what that history is, but did it really make a tld used by only 22k people more appealing?
https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/name-2014-03-03-en
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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.)
Uh, 99% of people would assume a .name address is a scam. Hate to break it to you.
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.