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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. Apparently, however, that’s not a benefit of 3LDs in practice, which leads me to conclude that john-doe.name and jane-doe.name just sell better.
It's a strange edgecase that the owner of John.Doe.com does not need to own Doe.com
In every other case that I know about, to own the Joe subdomain of Doe.com, you would need to own Doe.com
.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).
There is no subdomain/TLD bit
Still, I'm not sure there's any technical fix for the kind of mismanagement that .name was subjected to.
i.e. I own john.doe.name, you own george.joe.name. Once this change goes through, only "doe.name" can be owned, so who gets it?
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.
In a world without advertising, there's no reason why google.com couldn't also allow *.youtube.com to set cookies for it, but of course that would cause a tremendous privacy freakout. Though in practice they can and do just send every login/logout through a 302 redirect roundtrip to take care of the cookies on youtube.com.
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.
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...
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.
It's been around for years. I seem to remember this issue coming up around 2001 where originally .name was for third level registration (i.e. john.doe.name) and changed to second level it a few years later and caused some problems... https://publicsuffix.org/ talks about it in light of architectural limitations of domain names.
> can Joe set a cookie on all of .smith.name?
That can happen. I seem to remember ancient browsers made it so .name (and other non-generic TLDs) required three periods. I think country code domains and new generic TLDS caused the browsers to change it.
It's pretty screwed up, but a lot of the people with .name domains have had them for a very long time. Sad to see them all lose their identity online that way.
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.
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 x.y.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.
https://publicsuffix.org/
edit: apparently not all second level domains in .name are public suffixes anymore, so a wildcard addition wouldn't be correct.
It has to be a money problem. Something they want to do will be simpler if this is no longer a quirky registry. And they know they'll get the money back that they lose from not having bob.smith pay -- probably by throwing all the "last names" once registered this way into some "premium name" bucket and selling them for $1000 and up instead of the ~$10 that zyzgdhaf234.name fetches.
In fact, I'm not sure that scheme isn't the reason itself.
Different from .co.uk.
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
Its not hard to tell for things like ".uk" or other serious suffixes.
It only (maybe) becomes hard(er) to tell for all the vanity ccTLDs that came along in the 2000s. But even then 10 seconds on WHOIS and Google should fix any doubt.
> about the reverence of `co.uk`
What are you on about ? Lots of other countries do it too. Japan is one example given already here, but there are dozens. It is very common practice for country tlds.
5 seconds on wikipedia or google would have stopped them spreading completely dangerous FUD about .co.uk.
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.
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 be.
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?
The .name scenario is even worse. One domain gives you access to tens of thousands of users email. It seems like a privacy nightmare.
I’m not sure how future auth and privacy will work, but my child lost a tracfone phone and some mixup had separated it from my account. There was no way to recover the number. If that was my personal phone, how difficult would it be to restore banking, medical, and government access to things that assume I’ll always have that number.
Doing the same with personal email seems like too big of a risk.
But, assuming that Verizon can’t keep third level domains:
* Third level names where only one person has the second level domain should be transferred to whoever owns that single third level name.
* Third level names where multiple people have the same second level domain should be put up for closed bidding: Only current owners of .name domains with a given second level domain name (e.g. last name) will be able to bid for the second-level domain. So, if one has john.smith.name and joe.smith.name, Joe Smith and John Smith will be in a bidding war for smith.name.
If the issue of .name not being in public suffix is a real issue, Verizon can handle that by disabling new third-level .name registrations, and provide Public Suffix with a list of those registrations (just send all the owners a privacy notice, making it clear that the existence of the name will be made public for security reasons). More reading: https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/issues/2306
Now, personally, I think Verizon can keep these messy third level names, and are doing things so that Neil Fraser has to compete with every single 2-bit cybersquatter out there for the rights to fraser.name.
As an aside, it’s trivial to have DNS servers handle multi-level domains without having to have a zone file for every level; e.g. https://this.is.a.long.name.maradns.org works, and there’s no zone file for name.maradns.org, long.name.maradns.org, a.long.name.maradns.org, and so on.
Also, since people have brought up the “org fuckery” without providing details: https://bluecatnetworks.com/press/the-org-domain-sale-explai...
You know dang well if .org was owned by an investment entity, they would had jacked up the prices as much as they could get away with.
Again, you're security is only as strong as your DNS.
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
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?
[1] https://blog.asmartbear.com/free-markets-bad/
Gotta wonder what other possible disasters introduced with gTLDs.
> "will increase efficiency for the operation of the .name TLD."
What a preposterous excuse -- especially for something already up and running. Sounds like they probably want to change the backend in some way - or adopt some kind of off-the-shelf software - which doesn't jive so well with this unique TLD, and they figure "Ehh, fuck 'em, let's just pull the plug on these tens of thousands of people."
It’s incredibly one sided. The registry gets to cut costs and the detriment to registrants is extreme. ICANN is supposed to act on behalf of all participants.
The flagrant disregard for DNS stability in this case is jaw dropping.
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
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)
"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.
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
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 -_-
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.
> 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.
This is ridiculous.
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.
It has been established that national identifiers are protected by it, and a domain works as a sort of international identifier, in this case a personal one.
No one is obligated to give you a domain, but by contracting an obligation to provide that identifier until 2040, they would at least be liable for those damages, but there's an argument that depriving you of an identifier already granted is a more fundamental violation of a right to a name, an identifier and recordkeeping of them.
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.
...minutes?
* or arguably the same amount or less; for additional context: the author is an ex-Googler
”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
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.
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.