Comment by moron4hire
1 day ago
Jesus Christ. In 25 years of working on the Web, this is the first time I'm hearing of "third level domains". WTF? Where and when did this come from?
No shade to the folks being harmed by this situation. Sorry. I'm just really non-plussed at the idea that the registrar is charging for what looks like should be a DNS prefix.
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.
Those are not quite the same though, being something specific and short so essentially behave like a tld in their own right. For a long time you couldn't buy a <something>.uk, it had to be .co.uk or similar, so those _were_ the tld.
The way .name worked you could directly register <name1>.<name2>.name instead if getting <name2>.name and setting up <name1> as a subdomain. It meant john.smith.name and dave.smith.name could be completely separate registrations. You can't generally register <name1>.<name2>.tld like that.
> Those are not quite the same though, being something specific and short so essentially behave like a tld in their own right. For a long time you couldn't buy a <something>.uk, it had to be .co.uk or similar, so those _were_ the tld.
For a short time, you couldn't buy <something>.name either.
It's a little different in that there were fixed second level domains to register under in .uk (and most of the other country code TLDs that used similar schemes), and second level domains in .name opened up a few years into its existance, rather than decades in like for .uk
But still ... thousands of people signed up for these things and there should be an orderly process to give them continuity. Some of the third level domains are the only registrant under their second level name, they should get upgraded to having the second level with advanced notice (it's not quite the same service, but close enough).
For those on a shared second level, if Verisign doesn't want to manage that anymore, they should come up with a transition plan other than too bad, so sad. You could tranisition to an intermediary as the registrant of the second level domain and privately providing third level registration and email forwarding. It's not a lot of customers, but it's not a lot of work either. Put in some durable contractural terms allowing the 3rd level registrants to change providers by consensus and hope it doesn't blow up for another decade or so.
This is it. There's a blurry line wherever something should be the registrar's prerogative. The more on the "personal" or "local" scale, the less it should be in control of the registrar.
Though, from a certain academic perspective, I can maybe see some idiot making an ignorantly in-good-faith argument for something like personal names needing to be controlled at the registrar level. Never mind that all of the registrars are evil or that most people share a name with someone else in the world. It ironically goes hand-in-hand with their evilness that they should have the power to deny one party the use of their own name due to the incidental, unrelated, but preemptive use of that name by another party.
Said as the top search result for my firstname-lastname amongst at least 7 such people that I'm aware of, one of which I know is also a software developer. I only continue to preemptively register accounts under my one and only true name to avoid receiving their false and deceitful spam when they forget their email domain is Yahoo, not Gmail...
I know, you might be thinking he's are doing it on purpose to punish me for being more popular. I could see that if the email I was getting was porn or scams or whatever. It's not. It's mortgage paperwork. It's personalized cake decorations. It's hotel reservations. This dude is the worst at maintaining his data I've never met.
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There's two on the second page of active HN discussions, telegraph.co.uk and independent.co.uk.
Should we mention fourth-level domains, like ci.east-palo-alto.ca.us or stanborough.herts.sch.uk?
news.ycombinator.com is a third-level domain.
.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.
And the Public Suffix List didn't even attempt to handle .name.
https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/issues/2306
there’s nothing special about any level of domains, it was always a hierarchical protocol
The difference is that .name allowed you to buy steven.smith.name and someone else could buy john.smith.name. The shared hierarchy between those names is the .name domain, .smith.name doesn't really exist.
Of course, this could be trivially fixed if .name would take the shared part of every second level domain, treated it like a TLD for legacy customers, and turn it into a hierarchical system.
But they'd need to do that for possibly thousands of paying customers, there's no way they'd be able to afford that, Verisign only makes 1770000000 dollars of yearly revenue! Honoring these existing contracts would bankrupt them!
They wouldn't need to "do that" that's how it already works. They're actively undoing that
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ah i see, it does require a bit more custom code than a commodity tld then
shame that there’s no room in the world for some creativity and we need to normalize the space of all tlds into the same uncreative .com clone
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