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.name Termination

neil.fraser.name

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Re: .name Termination

#431

Post by pests »

esseph wrote: post #427
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.

This seems largely country dependent with some exceptions. In the US, once upon a time, elementary/middle/highschools might be attached to something like schoolname.district.state.gov. But now, even my local area school now has a .com. It seems that older hierarchy style is falling out of fashion for smaller/shorter domains across public services, schools, government agencies, etc. Now here it seems to be either a .c…

Good article on this by a fellow hner

https://computer.rip/2025-11-11-dot-us.html

Re: .name Termination

#432

Post by necovek »

desas wrote: post #210
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.

I think the problem is that .co.uk, .gov.uk and so on are very well known in the UK. The .name subdomain rules are not very well known anywhere.

How familiar are you with Serbian co.rs, org.rs, in.rs (individuals) and top-level .rs too? Will you confuse it with iz.rs giving free subdomains to individuals too ("iz" means from in Serbian)?

How about all the other 200+ country TLDs and rules for non-country TLDs?

Re: .name Termination

#433

Post by ButlerianJihad »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #415
ButlerianJihad wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The .us domain should’ve been universally useful for state and municipal governments, but most of those began registering directly under .gov, and not even in an orderly hierarchy under . st .gov But that was simply the easiest way to market your website as a trusted government entity. And now nobody has ever heard of .us domains in active use.

.us was primarily a hierarchy structure which in practice made confusing and hard to remember domain names, whereas .gov addresses hand out single domains which are generally easy to remember.

Personally, I never saw anything confusing about city.state.us; the hierarchy was organized perfectly logically in the 3-tier jurisdictional structure that every American schoolboy knows by 3rd grade.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.us

But your point about them being rather longer and difficult to remember stands, and the same for a .gov, which could be shorter and catchier.

However amusingly, .us opened up second-level registrations 24 years ago, which means that any qualifying entity could have their name registered directly under .us, which is obviously recognizable, and also one character shorter, than a .gov registration. However, by that time, I believe that .gov had increased in stature so that registering governmental entities under .gov carried more certainty of conveying official status than anything under .us.

Also sadly, QR Codes and URL shorteners today sort of obviate the need to directly register the shortest possible domain name. I don't know: I was always kind of fond of the .us hierarchy, and I'm just personally sad that it's fading away.

Re: .name Termination

#434

Post by ocdtrekkie »

ButlerianJihad wrote: post #433
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.us was primarily a hierarchy structure which in practice made confusing and hard to remember domain names, whereas .gov addresses hand out single domains which are generally easy to remember.

Personally, I never saw anything confusing about city . state .us; the hierarchy was organized perfectly logically in the 3-tier jurisdictional structure that every American schoolboy knows by 3rd grade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.us But your point about them being rather longer and difficult to remember stands, and the same for a .gov, which could be shorter and catchier. However amusingly, .us opened up second-…

City/state/US is logical, the problem is most other hierarchies confuse people. For instance k12 subdomains for schools couldn't use that nomenclature because school districts do not map cleanly to towns. And that's before you talk about fire departments, townships, libraries, park districts, and countless other governmental bodies and districts which have overlapping boundaries of their own.

.gov certainly cares a level of exclusionary access that isn't really true of .us. Only one entity, the US federal government, can decide to hand someone a .gov address. And generally there is few signals harder to fake or impersonate than one.

Re: .name Termination

#435

Post by epaga »

dang wrote: post #428
NAR8789 wrote: post #408

@dang can you update the domain extraction logic for hn titles to include the 3rd level domain for .name domains? It's a little too poetically unfortunate that HN lists the domain on this article as `fraser.name`

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…

While we have you here - I've seen this discussion multiple times - does @dang "do" anything to get your attention, or did you just happen to see it because you were scanning the comments manually, and therefore email is better for letting you know something?

Re: .name Termination

#436

Post by p4bl0 »

palemoonsinking wrote: post #372
p4bl0 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would they want to drop the possibility of selling some as premium domains? If they have their shells setup right they will probably be able to get a premium from some 3rd level domain owners wrongly afraid someone else is interested. The main problem with the Internet today is that we didn't destroy ICANN when they started this TLD sell off crap. A replacement institution may have at least told Verisign a TLD th…

The .name predates the TLD well-off crap. The first huge bulk of new TLDs happened in 2014, .name dates back from 2001, just like .info or .coop.

Also, .name filled an actual need for general non ccTLD: companies had .com, organizations had .org, Internet related stuff had .net, there was .gov, .edu, .mil, and ccTLDs, but nothing made for individuals. It filled this use case, it actually made sense.

Re: .name Termination

#437

Post by dang »

epaga wrote: post #435
dang wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While we have you here - I've seen this discussion multiple times - does @dang "do" anything to get your attention, or did you just happen to see it because you were scanning the comments manually, and therefore email is better for letting you know something?

We don't monitor @dang. We only monitor emails. Someone emailed me in this case.

Re: .name Termination

#438

Post by asdfsa32 »

gblargg wrote: post #406
nneonneo wrote: post #62

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…

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?).

This is why new gTLDs are insane and stupid. It is about time there is some _yours for life_ DNS system.

In this age, allowing domain names to be owned by other entities is almost like allowing a company business registration number or one's national id card number to be transferred to others.

I think name squatting is a problem, but it is not like that current system has solved it.

Re: .name Termination

#439

Post by flomo »

ButlerianJihad wrote: post #433
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.us was primarily a hierarchy structure which in practice made confusing and hard to remember domain names, whereas .gov addresses hand out single domains which are generally easy to remember.

Personally, I never saw anything confusing about city . state .us; the hierarchy was organized perfectly logically in the 3-tier jurisdictional structure that every American schoolboy knows by 3rd grade. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.us But your point about them being rather longer and difficult to remember stands, and the same for a .gov, which could be shorter and catchier. However amusingly, .us opened up second-…

> city.state.us

In reality, it wasn't that simple, and a lot of those .us domains looked like line noise.

Government sites are used to distribute public information. They need something they can print on a poster/sign. Not some bogus 'logical' hierarchy.

Re: .name Termination

#440

Post by echoangle »

TZubiri wrote: post #416
cowsup wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea is: * .name is open for everybody * a company called "Global Name Registry" scooped up a BUNCH of common last names, including fraser.name * Global Name Registry then sold access to neil.fraser.name for far cheaper than the fraser.name domain would cost on its own; someone else could also buy john.fraser.name or jane.fraser.name, so the single fraser.name domain that they owned could have dozens of customers…

Oh, I get it, I guess the question is what will Verisign do with the surname.name domains. They could be auctioned individually or by bulk, and somebody could buy them. But in essence they are exercising their right as a 2ld holder (Global Name Registry) to stop providing service. This is an ostensibly uncharacteristic move for verisign, but the customers that bought these 2ld did so from a non-verisign vendor, it is…

> This is an ostensibly uncharacteristic move for verisign, but the customers that bought these 2ld did so from a non-verisign vendor, it is only after verisign bought the 2ld holder that they became the holders and are now proceeding to extinguishing them after embracing and extending.

Why should I care as the customer? If I buy a for-life subscription plan and the company gets bought, can they just not honor it because it’s a different company now? Maybe they should check which promises they are buying when acquiring other companies.

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