Tell HN: Remember to migrate away from .name domain

Nah, turning existing domains premium (sometimes 10x or higher cost) under the users is IMO worse, as it can catch people that just have it on auto-renew unaware.

See also: .eu revoking registrations of UK residents after Brexit.

Well not really. There are TLDs where third level domains are the primary thing that people register; e.g you can't register example.uk, you need example.co.uk.

Although it is weird to have a registrar where you get to pick both the second and the third level freely.

Originally, you could register third-level domains directly.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49516047

.name was special (derogatory). When you registered first.last.name, .name would give an authoritative NS record for first.last.name, but not last.name. What you think is happening is that .name is spinning up a second DNS zone for last.name, and then issuing a normal declaration, but it's way more cursed.

Delegating multiple levels down is allowed by DNS spec but almost never done, and causes problems. For starters, some registrars just straight up did not handle the first.last.name case at all. Which is particularly bad for .name because originally, you could only register third-level domains. Only later did .name added second-level domain registration.

This creates an obvious collision problem: if John Doe registers john.doe.name first, and then Jane Doe wants to register doe.name, what happens?

You might think that, obviously, both registrations stick. But this means John Doe owns a subdomain of Jane Doe's namespace, that Jane Doe cannot get rid of or otherwise control. When someone looks up records on john.doe.name, doe.name is never queried; .name skips it. This causes all sorts of problems for cookies: John Doe can now set cookies on Jane Doe's website, and Jane Doe's website always sets cookies that John Doe's website can read[0].

The time-reversed scenario (John Doe registers after Jane Doe) is even worse. Obviously, top-level domain operators should not be allowed to project subdomains onto other people's registrations like this. Like, imagine if Verisign decided you could register subdomains on someone else's domain, that they did not control and could not get rid of, if you paid them a little extra? There would be all sorts of shenanigans.

The alternative resolution is confiscation: when Jane Doe registers doe.name, John Doe loses his website. This is more in line with how you thought it was working. And, indeed, what Verisign is planning to do is basically this en masse, dropping all the third-level delegations. Probably because the operational headaches of managing two different conflicting delegation schemes was too much.

[0] This is actually a problem for any DNS suffix that is shared across multiple websites; there's a Public Suffix List that exists specifically to keep you from, say, writing cookies to .com that hit every website. But doe.name isn't exactly a public suffix: it's Jane Doe's personal website, one that just happens to have a suffix collision with another website because of a stupid idea someone had.

> His registrar informed him that his registration will be terminated in February (even though it’s paid through 2040).

Wonder if registrars will refund to people's cards.

If Verisign frees up domain.name, the new owner could inherit email still directed to the old address, for example: password resets.

By kicking old nerds off legacy.domain.name, they can relist domain.name on the open market and make an absolute killing.

Good point, changed. Thanks!

No this is people who have registered john.johnson.name, but johnson.name remains Verisign's (and e.g. unrelated Alice has also registered alice.johnson.name)

I don't think so. If you own it, you can have any subdomain.

At least I hope this is the case. I have a memorial page for my uncle under hisfirstname.ourlastname.name

The proposed treaty between Britain and Mauritius was conditional on the approval of the USA (due to the UK/US air base), and that approval wasn't given.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian_Ocean_Territory

National TLDs from major developed nations and .com/.net/.org are the only TLDs I would consider safe for the long-term.

(I’m excluding restricted-use TLDs like .edu here.)

When the TLD first opened up you were not allowed to purchase {lastname}.name, it was restricted to third level domains only in an attempt to lure in customers wanting {first name}@{lastname}.name as an email address. But they didn't make it easy to configure that email redirect if you used another registar than verisign, and email has evolved.

Later in a desperate search for MORE MONEY, they opened up 2nd level if no 3rd level already existed under that 2nd. This sounds less like another search for more money with new sales as people are saying, but a reduction in unique domain handling and cost cutting (they can shutdown all those email redirection servers).

Yes, if you pay for {lastname}.name, the full domain is yours, including whatever you want to do with subdomains. However, .name also allowed direct registration of third level domains ({firstname}.{lastname}.name). These were mutually exclusive by domain… so if somebody registers the 3rd level, nobody can directly buy the 2nd level, and vise versa. As far as I understand, it was first come first serve based on the 2nd level domain.

There were also some shenanigans around automatic email routing in that case.

Not very many, but yes

You've never seen example.co.uk? Many countries use them because the top level domains for gov, edu, etc are restricted to one country.

.name has been doing this for 25 years so I guess you must've missed them right when you got started!

For .uk, this scheme was the default until 2014 (a long time, considering it's first use was in 1985). Everything was .co.uk or .org.uk and you bought those directly with registrars. Then, in 2014, .uk registrations were allowed, and the .co.uk and .uk domains now coexist.

It’s so ad hoc that we need to maintain reference datasets to identify what’s registrable:

https://publicsuffix.org/

A real mess.

there’s nothing special about any level of domains, it was always a hierarchical protocol