Comment by jeroenhd
17 hours ago
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
There are good reasons to do it to be honest (aside from people not knowing about these types of domains, DNS servers also need to be maintained to keep this kind of delegation working which isn't free, and then there's the whole problem the public suffix list is trying to solve).
There's no strict need to do it, let alone to do it now, but an eventual transition does make sense, if spread out over a couple of years with guaranteed backwards compatibility and maintaining existing domains and ownership.
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
> 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
this is in large part pushed by custom tlds being at high risk of prices suddenly going up by 10 times or 1000 times.