Comment by dbt00

14 hours ago

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.

30 comments

dbt00

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ndiddy  13 hours ago

.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).

desas  14 hours ago

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.

  • necovek  3 hours ago

    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?

dpoloncsak  13 hours ago

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.

davkan  14 hours ago

I can’t think of any prominent ones outside of country code domains.

  • bombcar  14 hours ago

    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.

    • davkan  13 hours ago

      Outside of the context of ccTLDs and city.state.gov etc, I struggle to think of examples 3LD+ domains where they are owned and operated by completely different concerns than the parent. If at some point you could just register your own mysite.state.gov domains willy nilly that's probably before my initial time online around 2000.

      Another poster raised the point of hosting services which is valid. But at present outside of that example and the above I really can't think of an example where you have a link to entity.com and you have any significant cause to verify the identity beyond the 2LD.

      2 replies →

  • strenholme  13 hours ago

    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.

    • fc417fc802  12 hours ago

      You say "registered" to you as though this was via an official registrar but surely you mean that someone rented ca.us and decided on their own to lease out subdomains to people?

      (Aside, I always see "owned" and "bought" but you can only ever "lease" under the ICANN system as the present situation so clearly demonstrates.)

      7 replies →

  • ketzu  13 hours ago

    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.

    • davkan  13 hours ago

      None of these examples are of actual separate registration/ownership of a 3LD from the parent 2LD. Cloudflare owns the domain for myproject.pages.dev and hosts all the relevant infra. Not to say that there isn't a different entity represented by the 3LD than the 2LD but it's not exactly the same.

      Also I would not consider the examples of tumblr and reddit to be relevant. A person's blog on myprofile.tumblr.org is still the tumblr organization. This would be true for reddit even if they didn't redirect. Reddit admins moderate content on all subreddits.

      5 replies →

esseph  5 hours ago

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.