Comment by TZubiri
13 hours ago
I don't get the difference. If I acquire the y domain and make it work as a subdomain broker, it's the same thing no?
There is no subdomain/TLD bit
13 hours ago
I don't get the difference. If I acquire the y domain and make it work as a subdomain broker, it's the same thing no?
There is no subdomain/TLD bit
You are technically correct, but Verisign billed buying an x subdomain as if the y domain was part of a stable infrastructure. Which it kind of was until they decided to pull the rug.
Presumably Verisign is the owner of the y domain and wouldn't dare sell it off to the highest bidder...
[dead]
Is there any resource you can point towards understanding this? I'm well versed on DNS itself, so it can be a technical document.
What I understand would be the following:
1- Verisign manages the TLD registry for .name (and others), which includes managing the authoritative DNS servers (as pointed to by the .name NS and A records on the root DNS servers), 2- as well as for updating the NS records of .name records it is authoritative at the request of registrars (like, say GoDaddy), which act on behalf of domain owners. 3- one or some of the domain owners, for example for fraser.name, acted as a registry themselves managing authoritative DNS servers for NS records of .fraser.name domains, these third level DNS servers being pointed to by the name. NS records.
4- Upon registration of a .name domain, verisign charged a fee, (in the case of .coms this is around 10$ currently I believe, not sure how much they charge), and ICANN charges a much lesser fee (like 20 cents).
5- Upon registration of a .fraser.name domain, the fraser.name domain owner charged a fee, and they kept the totality of that fee (potentially paying a fee to ICANN, but definitely not to verisign.)
6- Verisign issues this request, requesting registrars of second level domains (domain.tld) like GoDaddy, to stop selling third level domains of this TLD (domain.2ld.tld).
This is my understanding of the situation, and in that case, verisign was not billing for the domain. This might (a bit cynically) provide a commercial motivation for the actions of verisign.
It's worth noting that this is not at all a weird or shady practice, multi-level domains are the very ethos of the domain system, it's built for that, I'm not saying any domain is obligated to do that on the basis that it can, but it's not some esoteric illegal activity, it's normal.
The Public Suffix List is the closest thing we have to the "subdomain/TLD bit", but afaik it doesn't include wildcards like `*.name`. It does influence TLS though (or possibly just browsers) in that a wildcard cert for an entire TLD or public suffix won't be honored, nor will a public CA issue such a cert.
Still, I'm not sure there's any easy technical fix for the .name debacle.
I'm aware of that, it's an ad-hoc out of band list maintained by Mozilla, not 'official' or recognized by any process like an RFC, but it does exist.
It's safe to ignore altogether, but it can come in handy as a starting domain block/allowlist.
>Still, I'm not sure there's any easy technical fix for the .name debacle.
I think that it's gonna be ok, the owner of the 2ld is still the owner, so they are free to allow the 3ld domain owners to continue "owning" their domains and updating them on the authoritative 2ld DNS. It's just that verisign is no longer sanctifying it by allow vendors of other 2ld to sell 3ld with the 2ld together.
This might explain the whole situation, many of us are interpreting that the domains are deleted, but in reality, they may more likely be prohibited from being represented as official .name domains in registrars .
From what it sounds like, unlike domains under other TLDs, when you purchase a domain under .name you always purchase specifically the three-segment domain.
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?
I own a .name domain that is an initialism for my wife and I, and Namecheap never gave me any problems adding a record for vpn.mwai.name, for example. In fact I never even realized you could register a 3LD, much less that this was the intended(?) behavior.
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 associated to it. They worked with ICANN to allow each domain to have its own registered owner.
* The article in the OP bought neil.fraser.name and has used it for years
* Verisign bought Global Name Registry; later they realized, hey, we're sorta not making a lot of money on this idea, and we're spending a lot of time/resources maintaining these domains "for cheap" and chasing renewals, and not scooping up more customers. Let's just stop it and stop paying for fraser.name and the potentially hundreds of other domains we own.
* Neil Fraser, not the only Fraser in the world, is upset because he might lose the domain he's had forever
So one CAN buy the mwai.name domain, as you have, and continue using vpn.mwai.name just fine. It's just you can't "officially" start selling out these subdomains as a separate registrar entry.
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