Comment by dpoloncsak
14 hours ago
I can say, as a SysAdmin, I have been taught and tell my users to check the domain to verify a website is real.
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
edit: I guess I've gotten so used to the government 3LDs I just don't even see them anymore, or just see something like .co.uk or .edu.us as a TLD by itself, but yeah those exist too. Still the exception to the rule
That is definitely not true. There are literally thousands if not tens of thousands of well known domains that do this. .co.uk is a very common example.
.name is still a weird edge case because of the naming rules. Whether or not all subdomains under doe.name belong to the same person depends solely on whether the first person registered "doe.name" (in which case they do) or "john.doe.name" (in which case they don't, and "doe.name" is excluded from purchase as a standalone domain).
I think the problem is that .co.uk, .gov.uk and so on are very well known in the UK.
The .name subdomain rules are not very well known anywhere.
How familiar are you with Serbian co.rs, org.rs, in.rs (individuals) and top-level .rs too? Will you confuse it with iz.rs giving free subdomains to individuals too ("iz" means from in Serbian)?
How about all the other 200+ country TLDs and rules for non-country TLDs?
The fact that multiple organizations need to keep a public list of known 3LDs proves it's the edge case, does it not?
"Here's a list of things that look like subdomains for you to treat as 3LDs instead of subdomains" sounds exactly like the solution to an edge case to me.
I can’t think of any prominent ones outside of country code domains.
You can almost guess someone's age from that alone - they're more rare, but long domain names still appear that encode a city and a state, and you could just "grab" the first part when signing up.
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I remember I had beach.santa-cruz.ca.us at one point registered to me. I owned beach.santa-cruz.ca.us, someone else owned santa-cruz.ca.us, yet someone else owned ca.us, and I believe Network Solutions took care of .us at the time.
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Github Pages is probably the most well known one (on here).
I think geocities had this as well?
A lot of hosting services offer this in general. (eg render)
Tumblr? (Might not count as the control over the page is more limited. The subdomains "are" still tumblr.)
For reddits subdomains are redirects to subreddits of the same name, so I guess that doesn't count.
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This seems largely country dependent with some exceptions.
In the US, once upon a time, elementary/middle/highschools might be attached to something like schoolname.district.state.gov. But now, even my local area school now has a .com. It seems that older hierarchy style is falling out of fashion for smaller/shorter domains across public services, schools, government agencies, etc.
Now here it seems to be either a .com, .gov, .org, or a totally different and newer tld. Even .net has fallen out of fashion.
Good article on this by a fellow hner
https://computer.rip/2025-11-11-dot-us.html
The writing was on the wall when Pennsylvania switched their license plates from www.state.pa.us to visitpa.com
Looking at the threads below, very few people are discussing technical things in dns terms like zone or nameserver.
Yeah. The way how most things on the internet prove ownership make the assumption that the 3ld is owned by the 2ld. Extend it once out for country specific ones and you cover most cases that people have to work with.
Then when you consider DNS is fundamental infrastructure and people build secure things on top of it, (ahem DNS challenges for certs), it's remarkable that anyone would want or desire edge cases.
This doesn't seem like a problem if you exclusively support 3LDs and don't let anyone register 2LDs.
Yet that is a problem the owner of such a domain has freely entered into by buying that domain, it's their right to keep it despite this apparent problem, if they wish.
Understood, and .name isn't being used enough in business to worry about 'the effect it will have on my users'. Just pointing out that it doesn't work like the 'norm' (although I guess it's not quite as unique as I thought, either)
There are still exceptions to this like .co.uk and many others.
Hello sysadmin. Good luck navigating the internet.
What you should know, and what your browser does know and automatically applies cookie policy and colouring your URL bar, is the Public Suffix List: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Suffix_List
It will let you know that, for example, one does not need to own .co.uk to own the subdomain foo.co.uk.
The .name mess is not in the public suffix list.
https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/issues/2306 for more discussion.
The public suffix list is a half assed bandaid over a fundamentally broken system.
I appreciate this, and yeah the government/education ones slipped my mind, but I stand by the fact that the reason a list needs to be kept in the first place is because this is the edge case and not the norm.