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.name Termination

neil.fraser.name

451–460 of 564 posts

Re: .name Termination

#451
post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically, xx.us (where xx is a two letter state code) domains have been owned* by the named US state, which then would issue subdomains on top. I believe this was originally planned and set up by ICANN themselves. *: I realize that “owned” is a loaded word here, but (1) I’m referring to a registrar/issuer, which makes it yet more complicated as to how much “ownership” (de facto or otherwise) a given entity may ha…

My aside wasn't intended to be pedantic, rather observing the apparent inconsistency in how it appears people think about these matters versus what the present situation illustrates the reality to be. > but (1) I’m referring to a registrar/issuer, which makes it yet more complicated We're also talking about a ccTLD which makes it even more complicated. AFAIK those fall entirely under the jurisdiction of the respectiv…

  > AFAIK those fall entirely under the jurisdiction of the respective UN recognized government
How does that work for e.g. Taiwan, where the UN recognises the mainland government's claim to sovereignty in practice?

Re: .name Termination

#452
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy example.it.com on many registrars. Someone bought it.com and operates it like a TLD.

Interesting. I do wonder how many people outside scammers and squatters buy them. I'd rather have an .xyz or .biz address personally.

When someone defames at SEO-optimized large-company.it.com, then Large Company gets interested.

Or, more succinctly, when money gets involved.

Re: .name Termination

#453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're insane and should not be in charge. I remember back when we had to write mechanize scripts to drive a browser through the renewal process, because if you had dozens, hundreds, or thousands of domains there was no nonmanual way, especially if you wanted extended verification or something silly like that. So what I'm saying is, agreed and that has always been true.

That actually sounds like a good thing. Why are you hording hundreds or thousands of domains?

I was working for a company that had hundreds and thousands of domains. It was a fortune 50 company, and they had a policy generally against wildcard domains.

Re: .name Termination

#454

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…

> the right thing they should do Can someone explain why a product "registered and paid for until 2040" can be unilaterally voided like this without compensation?

And lets be clear here, refunding the registration fees should NOT be considered even close to sufficient compensation as Neil and others like him have reasonable assumed they would control the name for that time and made choices that depend on that.

Re: .name Termination

#455
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…

> Expiring domains is bad for the web Short-term, it might seem like it would make sense for domain registrations to be permanent, but long-term, it introduces at least two insurmountable problems: 1. Unless some other cleanup mechanism is in place, eventually (like, hundreds of years into the future) domains will need to get longer and longer as people who owned old ones disappear and new people need new ones. 2. Th…

1) that has to be the worse case of premature optimization.

2) just solve the puzzle? The existing domain name system was wonderful when it was introduced.

I'll do a crude solution that shouldn't make it to the short list of goodness: Just make the commercial part into a web directory with all registered businesses. Have some of those filters we are now all familiar with. It might even smoothly transition into a product catalog. Sell placement rather than some random name no one will accidentally bump into. Let's also do a nice tag based web directory for personal websites. Extra points if there is opml

    
It's not really my problem to solve under technofeudalism but it should be possible to make something modern.

Re: .name Termination

#456
post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the right thing they should do Can someone explain why a product "registered and paid for until 2040" can be unilaterally voided like this without compensation?

Because they haven’t been sued enough yet?

ICANN should not approve such an obviously fraudulent move even without anyone being sued. Neither should Verisign even consider that they'll be able to get away with it. If you need to sue for this something else is already very wrong with the system.

Re: .name Termination

#457
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Yes, that's what Verisign does here - they also host many of the other big generic TLDs like .com.

Re: .name Termination

#458
post #385
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…

Thank you for the clarification. Not sure if it was the author's intent but they made it sound like .name will cease to exist.

No they didn't. The only way to interpret it that way is to only read the title (i.e., be a typical HN denizen) and stop there, not even getting to

> On 15 April 2026 Verisign proposed the destruction of the entire 3rd level of the '.name' hierarchy in order to simplify their administration.

Re: .name Termination

#459
post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

fraser.name does not seem to be currently registered, so it seems they could automatically give him that name, and hence solve the problem entirely. But I wonder if there might be some competing names on the third level? Like, he's neil.fraser.name, but what if there's also bob.fraser.name and they'd both very much like to keep their domains?

I think the point is that currently if anyone.fraser.name is registered, then fraser.name cannot be registered.

The change that Verisign is making is to deregister all the *.fraser.name domain registrations, which will then free up fraser.name for registration.

So it becomes a race to register fraser.name and the winner gets to recreate all the *.fraser.name subdomains they want, for whatever purpose they want.

Re: .name Termination

#460
post #335

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…

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

The PSL is a giant hack that gives the PSL maintainers authority over something that should be a hierarchical delegation. It's an affront to the DNS system and should not be considered to have any relevance by ICANN or any standards bodies.
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