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.name Termination

neil.fraser.name

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Re: .name Termination

#281

Post by mulmen »

wormius wrote: post #167
dvt wrote: post #158

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.…

Or just honor the deal. The only reason for doing this is Verisign’s bottom line.

Re: .name Termination

#282

Post by [deleted] »

xg15 wrote: post #177
akersten wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know about the public suffix list - I was wondering about the wildcard specifically. In the very issue you linked to, as of 2025, it seems this was still unresolved...: > We have no plans to modify the .name entries at this point in time. We are aware of the implications of adding a wildcard, therefore we won't.

Yeah, apparently they both (used to) offer unbounded registrations of 3LDs and unbounded registrations of 2LDs? So if I see j.doe.name, the only way to find out if "doe.name" is a public suffix or not, i.e. if I should (not) be able to set a cookie on it, would be to email the registrar? So does that mean that in practice, .name domains were always treated by browsers like regular 2LDs, meaning the cookie and origin…

[deleted]

Re: .name Termination

#283

Post by zamadatix »

econ wrote: post #223

I don't like the way domains work in general. It's really quite expensive if you are wise enough to buy everything that looks to much like your website. Did buy https://ycombinator.us Didn't buy https://ycombinator.co.uk https://ycombinator.de What useful functionality is there in selling these domains? Expiring domains is bad for the web and selling them to someone else is as terrible as the article makes it out to…

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.

Re: .name Termination

#284

Post by toast0 »

layer8 wrote: post #196
xp84 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even that doesn't pass basic scrutiny. The same ambiguity can and always will exist with tim-apple.com and tim.apple.com - there's nothing here that needs fixing.

True, they can’t outright prevent the ambiguity, but much fewer people will go to the trouble of establishing such subdomains when the option isn’t directly offered by the registrar. This is my theory because, a priori, 3LDs should be more profitable than 2LDs, because with 3LDs John Doe and Jane Doe don’t have to compete over doe.name , but instead can each separately purchase john.doe.name and jane.doe.name . Appar…

> This is my theory because, a priori, 3LDs should be more profitable than 2LDs,

3LDs are less valuable. In a market of many different tlds, why register foo.bar.name when you could get foobar.name or foobar.something_else

Re: .name Termination

#285

Post by [deleted] »

ndiddy wrote: post #245
dbt00 wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is definitely not true. There are literally thousands if not tens of thousands of well known domains that do this. .co.uk is a very common example.

.name is still a weird edge case because of the naming rules. Whether or not all subdomains under doe.name belong to the same person depends solely on whether the first person registered "doe.name" (in which case they do) or "john.doe.name" (in which case they don't, and "doe.name" is excluded from purchase as a standalone domain).

[deleted]

Re: .name Termination

#287

Post by aliasxneo »

hellcow wrote: post #280
aliasxneo wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Names are not able to be traded, so it's first come first serve. It's impossible to completely defeat name squatting, but you can make it less enticing. In the above case, Alice can "sell" her name to Bob on some aftermarket but the only way to do so is by transferring the cryptographic material. This is fraught with issues, especially considering once Bob has the keys he has no obligation to pay. Names are valid for…

Seems like you could use an escrow to defeat this and sell domain names safely and easily.

Like I said, it's impossible to "defeat" it outright because the concept doesn't really lend itself to this sort of structure. If I buy a plaque with my name on it , therefore owning it, the only thing that could really keep me from selling it would be some centralized authority. Even then, black markets have existed for drugs for centuries.

Re: .name Termination

#288

Post by QuantumNomad_ »

layer8 wrote: post #196
xp84 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even that doesn't pass basic scrutiny. The same ambiguity can and always will exist with tim-apple.com and tim.apple.com - there's nothing here that needs fixing.

True, they can’t outright prevent the ambiguity, but much fewer people will go to the trouble of establishing such subdomains when the option isn’t directly offered by the registrar. This is my theory because, a priori, 3LDs should be more profitable than 2LDs, because with 3LDs John Doe and Jane Doe don’t have to compete over doe.name , but instead can each separately purchase john.doe.name and jane.doe.name . Appar…

Prior to reading the OP blog post, I had never looked into the particular rules that .name has.

To me, prior to knowing how it works, I would have assumed that either

a) john.doe.name would be a subdomain that someone who was just starting out had gotten for free supported by ads. Similar to having johndoe.freewebs.com back in the day. Not something most people would use for anything professional.

or,

b) doe.name was registered by one of the people in a family of Doe’s where every Doe is pretty closely related. For example, John of john.doe.name and Jane of jane.doe.name are husband and wife, or third cousins, or what have you. Most of the content, I would assume, is mostly about things that relate to the family. Like maybe one guy is doing a family genealogy project tracing the roots of this little cluster of Doe’s back in time and has made a site covering the findings from his research. And another one probably has some photo albums with pictures of like previous Thanksgivings and other family get togethers. In other words, nothing I would care about unless I was in their family or a very close friend of the family.

I would not have guessed that .name 3LDs worked the way that it did if I hadn’t read about it.

And on the other hand, if I saw just www.doe.name or johndoe.name, I would not make such assumptions. It would be not much different than seeing www.doe.com or johndoe.com respectively. I would just assume that .com was already taken and therefore they used .name, or that they happened to like the .name TLD because it emphasises that their site has their name as domain name.

Re: .name Termination

#289

Post by strenholme »

xp84 wrote: post #250
strenholme wrote: post #226

The correct way to handle this mess is to simply keep things messy. BGP tables are a big mess, for example, because a lot of companies keep their IPs when going from ISP to ISP. But, assuming that Verisign can’t keep third level domains (as a DNS implementer, I don’t think third level domains is a huge deal; see thread below): * Third level names where only one person has the second level domain should be transferred…

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 sea…

I agree.

As a DNS implementer, the action plan is unnecessary. There are, what, only 22,000 or so .name domains. One can write code to do two lookups for firstname.lastname.name: If firstname.lastname.name is found, return the NS delegation. Otherwise, if lastname.name is found, return that NS delegation. Finally, if neither is found, return NXDOMAIN.

One argument is that this is hard to implement in the real world (it’s about one day, at most one week for a skilled DNS developer to pull off; probably half a day to be honest, and yes I have written code like this), so then yeah if that’s a real concern let’s have a closed auction. I’m opposed to the auction, based on my experience that this isn’t hard to implement.

If it’s an issue, just stop all new firstname.lastname.name registrations, and only allow lastname.name new registrations. Then we only need to deal with this corner case for about 22,000 domains, which we can keep in a special hash and would take about four megs to store.

Re: .name Termination

#290

Post by zamadatix »

arjie wrote: post #50

We were rescued from that dot org scam by the fact that ICANN is a California non profit. I wonder if the AG can lean on them again. This is an outrageous thing to do.

MagicMoonlight was [dead]ed for not knowing what "dot org scam" refers to. Since I can't reply there right now and it's not reasonable to expect everyone to know what this refers to:

ICANN, a 501(c)(3), proposed to remove the price cap on .org registration, commonly used for non profits, so PIR, the 501(c)(3) registrar for .org, could then announce it planned to sell .org operations to private equity investment firm Ethos Capital.

Thankfully the overwhelming response caused the proposal to be scrapped.

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