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kiesel 1 days ago [-]
Worth noting, this doesn't affect domain.name, thus 2nd level domains. I was actually unaware you could directly register a 3rd level domain... Got my .name in the sunrise phase of .name, though it later rendered obsolete by name change on marriage (but still got it).
c7b 2 hours ago [-]
I hope the unassociated previously registered x.domain.name subdomains will be blocked somehow? This sounds super scary.
crusty 18 hours ago [-]
I'm curious, why were people interested in these .name domains? john.smith.name is weird. Why not just get Johnsmith.me or net or whatever?
Were they charging a fractional rate since you were getting a fractional domain? If it was $3 USD per year, I could see the appeal for some.
drdexebtjl 11 hours ago [-]
I think they also gave you a john@smith.name email, which is pretty neat. People with common last names would otherwise have a hard time registering a domain with just their last name to get a similar email address.
pelagicAustral 1 days ago [-]
Biggest rug pull in the history of dns
InsidiousWombat 1 days ago [-]
Nah, turning existing domains premium (sometimes 10x or higher cost) under the users is IMO worse, as it can catch people that just have it on auto-renew unaware.
hoppp 1 days ago [-]
This. Happened to me a few times.
I get a cheap domain for allegedly $1 renew and then get charged for $10 because they changed their minds.
It should be illegal.
aprilnya 6 hours ago [-]
$10 is not bad, I've seen situations where domains turned into premium and jumped to triple digits...
notpushkin 3 hours ago [-]
$1 → $10 really seems like first year vs renewal pricing.
donmcronald 12 hours ago [-]
Yeah. Shame on ICANN for allowing this. It’s another example that ICANN isn’t working in the public’s interest.
zarzavat 22 hours ago [-]
See also: .eu revoking registrations of UK residents after Brexit.
RedNifre 21 hours ago [-]
The EU, like most countries, only grants their tld to people, companies or organizations based in the European Union. Why should UK citizens be allowed to use it?
Dylan16807 21 hours ago [-]
Revocation shouldn't be nearly as strict as granting.
altern8 19 hours ago [-]
When they got it, they were presumably citizens of a EU country
dpark 18 hours ago [-]
Shockingly last time I quit a job they revoked my access to their systems even though I was totally an employee when my access was granted.
altern8 16 hours ago [-]
I see a domain name as property. Am I allowed to buy a house close to the border? Yes. If they change the law, I don't think it's fair to take the house away from me.
dpark 15 hours ago [-]
If the EU had a law saying no foreigner could own a house inside the EU, and you bought a house and then renounced your EU citizenship, it would be entirely appropriate that the EU forces you to sell the house or forfeit it.
Dylan16807 1 hours ago [-]
Why would that law need to exist for something as minor as a domain name? If it was a valid purchase then let them keep it.
altmanaltman 42 minutes ago [-]
You don't really own the domain name though, you rent it from the registar for a fixed term during which you can trade it if you so desire. But it is not something you own, it is a rental with conditions and it can always be taken away. Not saying its fair or not but that's what it fundamentally is and doesn't really map to a fully owned asset.
dwattttt 7 hours ago [-]
Fair? No, not at all. Even eminent domain specifies that the seizure be for public use, and the owner be fairly compensated.
bestham 15 hours ago [-]
No, but if the country where you built your house changes. Then your adress is going to change no matter what.
dpark 14 hours ago [-]
Also very true. You own the house, the government owns the address.
mort96 21 hours ago [-]
That seems like a rather predictable consequence?
SamSkjord 21 hours ago [-]
As a Brit: play stupid games, win stupid prizes
dpark 18 hours ago [-]
Agreed. I don’t know why Britain keeps feigning surprise that they are no longer treated like they’re part of the EU.
gonzalohm 1 days ago [-]
I'm not sure I get it. If anyone registers a domain first.second.name then you are basically registering a subdomain under second.name, right? You don't own anything, second.name owns your subdomain and can do whatever they want with it
mort96 21 hours ago [-]
Well not really. There are TLDs where third level domains are the primary thing that people register; e.g you can't register example.uk, you need example.co.uk.
Although it is weird to have a registrar where you get to pick both the second and the third level freely.
galaxy_quest 21 hours ago [-]
For your example, you can register second level domains under .uk since 2014
bichiliad 1 days ago [-]
Originally, you could register third-level domains directly.
.name was special (derogatory). When you registered first.last.name, .name would give an authoritative NS record for first.last.name, but not last.name. What you think is happening is that .name is spinning up a second DNS zone for last.name, and then issuing a normal declaration, but it's way more cursed.
Delegating multiple levels down is allowed by DNS spec but almost never done, and causes problems. For starters, some registrars just straight up did not handle the first.last.name case at all. Which is particularly bad for .name because originally, you could only register third-level domains. Only later did .name added second-level domain registration.
This creates an obvious collision problem: if John Doe registers john.doe.name first, and then Jane Doe wants to register doe.name, what happens?
You might think that, obviously, both registrations stick. But this means John Doe owns a subdomain of Jane Doe's namespace, that Jane Doe cannot get rid of or otherwise control. When someone looks up records on john.doe.name, doe.name is never queried; .name skips it. This causes all sorts of problems for cookies: John Doe can now set cookies on Jane Doe's website, and Jane Doe's website always sets cookies that John Doe's website can read[0].
The time-reversed scenario (John Doe registers after Jane Doe) is even worse. Obviously, top-level domain operators should not be allowed to project subdomains onto other people's registrations like this. Like, imagine if Verisign decided you could register subdomains on someone else's domain, that they did not control and could not get rid of, if you paid them a little extra? There would be all sorts of shenanigans.
The alternative resolution is confiscation: when Jane Doe registers doe.name, John Doe loses his website. This is more in line with how you thought it was working. And, indeed, what Verisign is planning to do is basically this en masse, dropping all the third-level delegations. Probably because the operational headaches of managing two different conflicting delegation schemes was too much.
[0] This is actually a problem for any DNS suffix that is shared across multiple websites; there's a Public Suffix List that exists specifically to keep you from, say, writing cookies to .com that hit every website. But doe.name isn't exactly a public suffix: it's Jane Doe's personal website, one that just happens to have a suffix collision with another website because of a stupid idea someone had.
xg15 3 hours ago [-]
> You might think that, obviously, both registrations stick.
I actually thought that one of the two registrations would be denied.
The only (barely) sane way I see how a registrar could offer both 2nd and 3rd level domains at the same time would be to keep them entirely separate:
Maintain two lists: One is a list of ordinary 2nd level domains that were directly sold, say something like whatsina.name.
The other would be a list of "commons" 2nd level domains that cannot be sold, because people own individual 3rd level domains on it, like doe.name above.
Which domain belongs to which list would realistically be first-come first-serve: If Jane Doe got there first and purchased doe.name, it would become a directly sold domain, and John Doe's (and also Jack Doe's) registration requests for john.doe.name and jack.doe.name would be denied.
Conversely, if John Doe got his registration for john.doe.name through first, doe.name would become a "commons" domain and Jane Doe's request would be denied, but Jack Doe's request for jack.doe.name would still get through.
Though I guess management at registrars doesn't like the phrase "cannot be sold" so I guess that wasn't how it was handled?
toomuchtodo 4 days ago [-]
Consider editing title to be "Tell HN:" Thank you for the PSA!
nikanj 4 days ago [-]
Good point, changed. Thanks!
mindaslab 4 days ago [-]
Why re they doing this? Looks stupid to me.
nikanj 4 days ago [-]
By kicking old nerds off legacy.domain.name, they can relist domain.name on the open market and make an absolute killing.
layer8 1 days ago [-]
If even only two people would be interested in foo.example.name and bar.example.name, they could make more of a killing with the old scheme. Apparently such interest is lacking.
nikanj 24 hours ago [-]
The old scheme is just $20/y from both parties. The new scheme is $2000 from the one who won the auction of ”how much value do you price on keeping your established domain”
Plus all the added value from ”premium” domains such as @domain.name
PufPufPuf 1 days ago [-]
And they don't do refunds if you prepaid!
unsnap_biceps 22 hours ago [-]
How do you not prepay for a domain name?
opan 21 hours ago [-]
Prepaid for more than one year, I assume, like the comment elsewhere in the thread about paying for a domain for 40 years.
22 hours ago [-]
otterley 19 hours ago [-]
Can you point us to this? If there’s a contract, they either need to adhere to the original terms until the end of the period, or they need to provide a pro-rated refund (whichever the contract stipulates).
Kinrany 20 hours ago [-]
That sounds illegal
cowlevel 1 days ago [-]
This is the reason.
meredithbloom 10 hours ago [-]
I don't understand what this post is about. I own myfamily.name and I have host names like firstname.myfamily.name. What's wrong with that?
7bit 3 hours ago [-]
Nothing. OP's title is misleading at worst. At best he doesn't understand what's the actual issue.
Version has a number of domain names like fraser.name under which people could register for something.fraser.name. Verisign will remove those, so if you registered a third level domain from Verisign, that's when you need to migrate away
> His registrar informed him that his registration will be terminated in February (even though it’s paid through 2040).
Wonder if registrars will refund to people's cards.
cowlevel 1 days ago [-]
Definitely not. No company ever refunds unless you sue them, they're worried you'll sue them, or they want a good reputation, and domain registries do not care about reputation because they are monopolies. Registrars might, a little, but it's not up to them.
19 hours ago [-]
otterley 19 hours ago [-]
I don’t think the registered leaseholder in question even demanded the registrar adhere to the contractual terms. He may just be rolling over without a confrontation. The story smells incomplete to me.
CreepyHunterX 18 hours ago [-]
If Verisign frees up domain.name, the new owner could inherit email still directed to the old address, for example: password resets.
wodenokoto 1 days ago [-]
Wait, so if you own Johnson.name you and use John.Johnson.name as your web address, that will stop working?
OJFord 1 days ago [-]
No this is people who have registered john.johnson.name, but johnson.name remains Verisign's (and e.g. unrelated Alice has also registered alice.johnson.name)
PufPufPuf 1 days ago [-]
Which is an insane scheme to begin with. Why not "john-johnson.name"?
Arrowmaster 1 days ago [-]
So that you could use john@johnson.name as your email instead of john@john-johnson.name. The .name gtld was created in the height of the "we will move to a paperless world and email will become the universal way to communicate" era.
nrabulinski 21 hours ago [-]
I just own lastname.com so my email is first@last.com, would recommend (I guess probably a bit harder nowadays)
thayne 20 hours ago [-]
Only one person with a given lastname can do that (or I suppose one person and their near family).
toast0 22 hours ago [-]
Because registration of second level domains in .name was not available.
OtomotO 1 days ago [-]
I don't think so. If you own it, you can have any subdomain.
At least I hope this is the case. I have a memorial page for my uncle under hisfirstname.ourlastname.name
victorbjorklund 1 days ago [-]
Unrelated. What happened with .io? Didn’t they say they would disappear or did that change?
Symbiote 1 days ago [-]
The proposed treaty between Britain and Mauritius was conditional on the approval of the USA (due to the UK/US air base), and that approval wasn't given.
That approval would likely have been considered a mere formality under other administrations, but unfortunately intersected with the current administration's obsession over territory...
bbg2401 1 days ago [-]
It should never have been a mere formality anyway.
swiftcoder 1 days ago [-]
Yes it should. We're not typically concerned in the self-determination of small islands halfway around the globe (well, except for Guam and the Marshall islands...), and it's an issue entirely between the UK and a former colony.
nagaiaida 21 hours ago [-]
having a base there at all would seem to embody an inherent concern as to the self-determination of such islands insofar as one wants to keep determining the fate of the base
f33d5173 21 hours ago [-]
I guess all the startup founders must have gone to trump and begged him to stop it.
pan69 19 hours ago [-]
He told 'm to move to .si domains.
Symbiote 5 hours ago [-]
Maybe Melania can prevent him from threatening Slovenia.
mnd999 1 days ago [-]
I have a second level and I’m in the process too. This kind of shitty behaviour warrants bankruptcy.
7bit 3 hours ago [-]
You are misrepresenting the issue and misleading a lot of people with that title. Please change it and clarify the issue or delete your thread altogether. It's false.
Also, you can change Azure admin emails. Not sure what you're on about. There's no such thing as unchangeable email addresses in Azure in the way you are making believe. I think I know what you mean but even then there's a way to change things.
Don't be an alarmist because you're ignorant.
BrandoElFollito 1 days ago [-]
I had a .name domain since its birth. Then proceeded to loose it because of bad luck and bad planning.
I tried to retrieve it but after a week of back and forth exchanges (mostly back from my side) I gave up.
Moved to .fr hoping that it will be stable (price wise) as a national TLD - so far so good.
layer8 1 days ago [-]
National TLDs from major developed nations and .com/.net/.org are the only TLDs I would consider safe for the long-term.
(I’m excluding restricted-use TLDs like .edu here.)
OtomotO 1 days ago [-]
tbh, as an owner of a .name (tld) I don't understand how this worked in the real world.
I have subdomains like {myfirstname}.{lastname}.name ... {lastname}.name is mine
So obviously {myfirstname}.{lastname}.name is a subdomain...
Could someone now have bought {myfirstname}.{lastname}.name and DNS would go to their page?
If so, I find the new behaviour way more sane...
If I wanted to sell a subdomain, I could do this, no questions asked. I just point the subdomain to another IP.
But I pay for {lastname}.name so it should be mine, just like any other .tld I have!
wakamoleguy 1 days ago [-]
Yes, if you pay for {lastname}.name, the full domain is yours, including whatever you want to do with subdomains. However, .name also allowed direct registration of third level domains ({firstname}.{lastname}.name). These were mutually exclusive by domain… so if somebody registers the 3rd level, nobody can directly buy the 2nd level, and vise versa. As far as I understand, it was first come first serve based on the 2nd level domain.
There were also some shenanigans around automatic email routing in that case.
Meleagris 1 days ago [-]
Ok. But why would anyone buy a third level domain when they could have bought the second level? It’s a strange thing.
Were the third level domains cheaper?
Me personally, it wouldn’t even occur to me to register a third level directly, because why bother when you can have the second level and do whatever you want with it.
Super strange.
chrismorgan 1 days ago [-]
Third-level registration was how it was designed. Second-level was added later.
Buying a third level also came with some email functionality, so if you owned first.last.name, you would be able to forward emails from first@last.name to you. If you have firstlast.name, you need something like first@firstlast.name
It was a bit odd, but well intentioned.
Arrowmaster 1 days ago [-]
When the TLD first opened up you were not allowed to purchase {lastname}.name, it was restricted to third level domains only in an attempt to lure in customers wanting {first name}@{lastname}.name as an email address. But they didn't make it easy to configure that email redirect if you used another registar than verisign, and email has evolved.
Later in a desperate search for MORE MONEY, they opened up 2nd level if no 3rd level already existed under that 2nd. This sounds less like another search for more money with new sales as people are saying, but a reduction in unique domain handling and cost cutting (they can shutdown all those email redirection servers).
Giorgi 1 days ago [-]
Soo... people actually used it?
cpach 1 days ago [-]
Not very many, but yes
moron4hire 1 days ago [-]
Jesus Christ. In 25 years of working on the Web, this is the first time I'm hearing of "third level domains". WTF? Where and when did this come from?
No shade to the folks being harmed by this situation. Sorry. I'm just really non-plussed at the idea that the registrar is charging for what looks like should be a DNS prefix.
edent 1 days ago [-]
You've never seen example.co.uk? Many countries use them because the top level domains for gov, edu, etc are restricted to one country.
dspillett 1 days ago [-]
Those are not quite the same though, being something specific and short so essentially behave like a tld in their own right. For a long time you couldn't buy a <something>.uk, it had to be .co.uk or similar, so those _were_ the tld.
The way .name worked you could directly register <name1>.<name2>.name instead if getting <name2>.name and setting up <name1> as a subdomain. It meant john.smith.name and dave.smith.name could be completely separate registrations. You can't generally register <name1>.<name2>.tld like that.
toast0 22 hours ago [-]
> Those are not quite the same though, being something specific and short so essentially behave like a tld in their own right. For a long time you couldn't buy a <something>.uk, it had to be .co.uk or similar, so those _were_ the tld.
For a short time, you couldn't buy <something>.name either.
It's a little different in that there were fixed second level domains to register under in .uk (and most of the other country code TLDs that used similar schemes), and second level domains in .name opened up a few years into its existance, rather than decades in like for .uk
But still ... thousands of people signed up for these things and there should be an orderly process to give them continuity. Some of the third level domains are the only registrant under their second level name, they should get upgraded to having the second level with advanced notice (it's not quite the same service, but close enough).
For those on a shared second level, if Verisign doesn't want to manage that anymore, they should come up with a transition plan other than too bad, so sad. You could tranisition to an intermediary as the registrant of the second level domain and privately providing third level registration and email forwarding. It's not a lot of customers, but it's not a lot of work either. Put in some durable contractural terms allowing the 3rd level registrants to change providers by consensus and hope it doesn't blow up for another decade or so.
moron4hire 1 days ago [-]
This is it. There's a blurry line wherever something should be the registrar's prerogative. The more on the "personal" or "local" scale, the less it should be in control of the registrar.
Though, from a certain academic perspective, I can maybe see some idiot making an ignorantly in-good-faith argument for something like personal names needing to be controlled at the registrar level. Never mind that all of the registrars are evil or that most people share a name with someone else in the world. It ironically goes hand-in-hand with their evilness that they should have the power to deny one party the use of their own name due to the incidental, unrelated, but preemptive use of that name by another party.
Said as the top search result for my firstname-lastname amongst at least 7 such people that I'm aware of, one of which I know is also a software developer. I only continue to preemptively register accounts under my one and only true name to avoid receiving their false and deceitful spam when they forget their email domain is Yahoo, not Gmail...
I know, you might be thinking he's are doing it on purpose to punish me for being more popular. I could see that if the email I was getting was porn or scams or whatever. It's not. It's mortgage paperwork. It's personalized cake decorations. It's hotel reservations. This dude is the worst at maintaining his data I've never met.
cowlevel 1 days ago [-]
You probably mean registry.
moron4hire 1 days ago [-]
No, I definitely mean the entity in charge of maintaining the register, not the location in which the register is kept.
duskwuff 21 hours ago [-]
In domain registration parlance, that is the registry (e.g. Verisign for .com). A registrar is one of the companies which intermediates between the registry and the users who obtain domain registrations (e.g. GoDaddy).
Symbiote 1 days ago [-]
There's two on the second page of active HN discussions, telegraph.co.uk and independent.co.uk.
Should we mention fourth-level domains, like ci.east-palo-alto.ca.us or stanborough.herts.sch.uk?
pwdisswordfishs 1 days ago [-]
news.ycombinator.com is a third-level domain.
jeroenhd 1 days ago [-]
.name has been doing this for 25 years so I guess you must've missed them right when you got started!
For .uk, this scheme was the default until 2014 (a long time, considering it's first use was in 1985). Everything was .co.uk or .org.uk and you bought those directly with registrars. Then, in 2014, .uk registrations were allowed, and the .co.uk and .uk domains now coexist.
jl6 1 days ago [-]
It’s so ad hoc that we need to maintain reference datasets to identify what’s registrable:
there’s nothing special about any level of domains, it was always a hierarchical protocol
jeroenhd 1 days ago [-]
The difference is that .name allowed you to buy steven.smith.name and someone else could buy john.smith.name. The shared hierarchy between those names is the .name domain, .smith.name doesn't really exist.
Of course, this could be trivially fixed if .name would take the shared part of every second level domain, treated it like a TLD for legacy customers, and turn it into a hierarchical system.
But they'd need to do that for possibly thousands of paying customers, there's no way they'd be able to afford that, Verisign only makes 1770000000 dollars of yearly revenue! Honoring these existing contracts would bankrupt them!
singpolyma3 1 days ago [-]
They wouldn't need to "do that" that's how it already works. They're actively undoing that
jeroenhd 1 days ago [-]
There are good reasons to do it to be honest (aside from people not knowing about these types of domains, DNS servers also need to be maintained to keep this kind of delegation working which isn't free, and then there's the whole problem the public suffix list is trying to solve).
There's no strict need to do it, let alone to do it now, but an eventual transition does make sense, if spread out over a couple of years with guaranteed backwards compatibility and maintaining existing domains and ownership.
TZubiri 23 hours ago [-]
ah i see, it does require a bit more custom code than a commodity tld then
shame that there’s no room in the world for some creativity and we need to normalize the space of all tlds into the same uncreative .com clone
matkoniecz 20 hours ago [-]
> shame that there’s no room in the world for some creativity and we need to normalize the space of all tlds into the same uncreative .com clone
this is in large part pushed by custom tlds being at high risk of prices suddenly going up by 10 times or 1000 times.
Were they charging a fractional rate since you were getting a fractional domain? If it was $3 USD per year, I could see the appeal for some.
I get a cheap domain for allegedly $1 renew and then get charged for $10 because they changed their minds. It should be illegal.
Although it is weird to have a registrar where you get to pick both the second and the third level freely.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49516047
> When the TLD name was first launched, only third-level registrations and forwarded e-mail addresses were available.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.name
Delegating multiple levels down is allowed by DNS spec but almost never done, and causes problems. For starters, some registrars just straight up did not handle the first.last.name case at all. Which is particularly bad for .name because originally, you could only register third-level domains. Only later did .name added second-level domain registration.
This creates an obvious collision problem: if John Doe registers john.doe.name first, and then Jane Doe wants to register doe.name, what happens?
You might think that, obviously, both registrations stick. But this means John Doe owns a subdomain of Jane Doe's namespace, that Jane Doe cannot get rid of or otherwise control. When someone looks up records on john.doe.name, doe.name is never queried; .name skips it. This causes all sorts of problems for cookies: John Doe can now set cookies on Jane Doe's website, and Jane Doe's website always sets cookies that John Doe's website can read[0].
The time-reversed scenario (John Doe registers after Jane Doe) is even worse. Obviously, top-level domain operators should not be allowed to project subdomains onto other people's registrations like this. Like, imagine if Verisign decided you could register subdomains on someone else's domain, that they did not control and could not get rid of, if you paid them a little extra? There would be all sorts of shenanigans.
The alternative resolution is confiscation: when Jane Doe registers doe.name, John Doe loses his website. This is more in line with how you thought it was working. And, indeed, what Verisign is planning to do is basically this en masse, dropping all the third-level delegations. Probably because the operational headaches of managing two different conflicting delegation schemes was too much.
[0] This is actually a problem for any DNS suffix that is shared across multiple websites; there's a Public Suffix List that exists specifically to keep you from, say, writing cookies to .com that hit every website. But doe.name isn't exactly a public suffix: it's Jane Doe's personal website, one that just happens to have a suffix collision with another website because of a stupid idea someone had.
I actually thought that one of the two registrations would be denied.
The only (barely) sane way I see how a registrar could offer both 2nd and 3rd level domains at the same time would be to keep them entirely separate:
Maintain two lists: One is a list of ordinary 2nd level domains that were directly sold, say something like whatsina.name.
The other would be a list of "commons" 2nd level domains that cannot be sold, because people own individual 3rd level domains on it, like doe.name above.
Which domain belongs to which list would realistically be first-come first-serve: If Jane Doe got there first and purchased doe.name, it would become a directly sold domain, and John Doe's (and also Jack Doe's) registration requests for john.doe.name and jack.doe.name would be denied.
Conversely, if John Doe got his registration for john.doe.name through first, doe.name would become a "commons" domain and Jane Doe's request would be denied, but Jack Doe's request for jack.doe.name would still get through.
Though I guess management at registrars doesn't like the phrase "cannot be sold" so I guess that wasn't how it was handled?
Plus all the added value from ”premium” domains such as @domain.name
Version has a number of domain names like fraser.name under which people could register for something.fraser.name. Verisign will remove those, so if you registered a third level domain from Verisign, that's when you need to migrate away
Wonder if registrars will refund to people's cards.
At least I hope this is the case. I have a memorial page for my uncle under hisfirstname.ourlastname.name
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian_Ocean_Territory
Also, you can change Azure admin emails. Not sure what you're on about. There's no such thing as unchangeable email addresses in Azure in the way you are making believe. I think I know what you mean but even then there's a way to change things.
Don't be an alarmist because you're ignorant.
I tried to retrieve it but after a week of back and forth exchanges (mostly back from my side) I gave up.
Moved to .fr hoping that it will be stable (price wise) as a national TLD - so far so good.
(I’m excluding restricted-use TLDs like .edu here.)
I have subdomains like {myfirstname}.{lastname}.name ... {lastname}.name is mine
So obviously {myfirstname}.{lastname}.name is a subdomain...
Could someone now have bought {myfirstname}.{lastname}.name and DNS would go to their page?
If so, I find the new behaviour way more sane...
If I wanted to sell a subdomain, I could do this, no questions asked. I just point the subdomain to another IP.
But I pay for {lastname}.name so it should be mine, just like any other .tld I have!
There were also some shenanigans around automatic email routing in that case.
Were the third level domains cheaper?
Me personally, it wouldn’t even occur to me to register a third level directly, because why bother when you can have the second level and do whatever you want with it.
Super strange.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.name
It was a bit odd, but well intentioned.
Later in a desperate search for MORE MONEY, they opened up 2nd level if no 3rd level already existed under that 2nd. This sounds less like another search for more money with new sales as people are saying, but a reduction in unique domain handling and cost cutting (they can shutdown all those email redirection servers).
No shade to the folks being harmed by this situation. Sorry. I'm just really non-plussed at the idea that the registrar is charging for what looks like should be a DNS prefix.
The way .name worked you could directly register <name1>.<name2>.name instead if getting <name2>.name and setting up <name1> as a subdomain. It meant john.smith.name and dave.smith.name could be completely separate registrations. You can't generally register <name1>.<name2>.tld like that.
For a short time, you couldn't buy <something>.name either.
It's a little different in that there were fixed second level domains to register under in .uk (and most of the other country code TLDs that used similar schemes), and second level domains in .name opened up a few years into its existance, rather than decades in like for .uk
But still ... thousands of people signed up for these things and there should be an orderly process to give them continuity. Some of the third level domains are the only registrant under their second level name, they should get upgraded to having the second level with advanced notice (it's not quite the same service, but close enough).
For those on a shared second level, if Verisign doesn't want to manage that anymore, they should come up with a transition plan other than too bad, so sad. You could tranisition to an intermediary as the registrant of the second level domain and privately providing third level registration and email forwarding. It's not a lot of customers, but it's not a lot of work either. Put in some durable contractural terms allowing the 3rd level registrants to change providers by consensus and hope it doesn't blow up for another decade or so.
Though, from a certain academic perspective, I can maybe see some idiot making an ignorantly in-good-faith argument for something like personal names needing to be controlled at the registrar level. Never mind that all of the registrars are evil or that most people share a name with someone else in the world. It ironically goes hand-in-hand with their evilness that they should have the power to deny one party the use of their own name due to the incidental, unrelated, but preemptive use of that name by another party.
Said as the top search result for my firstname-lastname amongst at least 7 such people that I'm aware of, one of which I know is also a software developer. I only continue to preemptively register accounts under my one and only true name to avoid receiving their false and deceitful spam when they forget their email domain is Yahoo, not Gmail...
I know, you might be thinking he's are doing it on purpose to punish me for being more popular. I could see that if the email I was getting was porn or scams or whatever. It's not. It's mortgage paperwork. It's personalized cake decorations. It's hotel reservations. This dude is the worst at maintaining his data I've never met.
Should we mention fourth-level domains, like ci.east-palo-alto.ca.us or stanborough.herts.sch.uk?
For .uk, this scheme was the default until 2014 (a long time, considering it's first use was in 1985). Everything was .co.uk or .org.uk and you bought those directly with registrars. Then, in 2014, .uk registrations were allowed, and the .co.uk and .uk domains now coexist.
https://publicsuffix.org/
A real mess.
https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/issues/2306
Of course, this could be trivially fixed if .name would take the shared part of every second level domain, treated it like a TLD for legacy customers, and turn it into a hierarchical system.
But they'd need to do that for possibly thousands of paying customers, there's no way they'd be able to afford that, Verisign only makes 1770000000 dollars of yearly revenue! Honoring these existing contracts would bankrupt them!
There's no strict need to do it, let alone to do it now, but an eventual transition does make sense, if spread out over a couple of years with guaranteed backwards compatibility and maintaining existing domains and ownership.
shame that there’s no room in the world for some creativity and we need to normalize the space of all tlds into the same uncreative .com clone
this is in large part pushed by custom tlds being at high risk of prices suddenly going up by 10 times or 1000 times.