Comment by jawns
14 hours ago
Surely the author must have anticipated some heightened level of risk in pegging important parts of his personal and business life on a nonstandard TLD like this.
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.
> nonstandard TLD
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.
I have a .science domain and a .com domain.
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.
> 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.
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.
5 replies →
My insurance will not send emails to my first@last.family domain. Neither will several other systems. A number of systems flat out refuse to acknowledge that such a tld exists. (Improper assumptions about valid email addresses)
Non-standard as in "it's not up to my usual standards" not "is not part of a technical standard". I.e. it's a gTLD rather than a "standard" (in the previous sense) TLD.
> What exactly is non-standard about an ICANN-approved TLD?
Uh, 99% of people would assume a .name address is a scam. Hate to break it to you.
I mean, we could say much the same of any other non-country TLD, and probably half the country TLDs. That doesn’t mean one shouldn’t expect it to be administered responsibly
Anything other than .com, .net, .org, and well-known ccTLDs I see in search results subconsciously get skipped over as "probably SEO spam or other useless content". These new weird TLDs are like the .tk and .us of old.
.name is in no way a "nonstandard TLD." It has been in existence for a quarter of a century and was part of the first batch of new gTLDs approved after the dot-com boom had begun, in 2000.
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.