.name Grandfathered
neil.fraser.name> After a long and expensive battle, news just dropped that Verisign is retracting its plan to terminate 22,000 domain names and email redirects. Although they will be closing new registrations for 3rd-level .name domains, all existing domains (including this website) and email redirects will remain indefinitely.
This was what I figured SHOULD happen when they did this. Allow existing customers to keep renewing, but nobody new allowed, if a tld frees up over time, reclaim it completely and sell it off.
What they were proposing should really be illegal...
For it to be illegal I think we would have to have much stronger digital ownership laws. I would certainly support them. But for now a domain you "own" is just an entry in someone else's ledger and control is only enforced by contract for big players willing to pay.
There is a Ninth Circuit decision that domain names are a form of property
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kremen_v._Cohen
but it's tricky because the domain name registries and registrars have a kind of thicket of contracts nowadays that subordinates registrants' property interests to other rules and considerations. So I don't think a court would think that a modern-day domain name registrant has property rights in a domain name that supersede all of those contractual terms.
Edit: my recollection is that Kremen v. Cohen interpreted the legal defaults that applied because Kremen registered the domain name in an era when Network Solutions didn't require registrants to agree to a contract that limited Network Solutions's liability and gave it various explicit rights and powers.
I'm not a huge ICANN expert, but I think ICANN broadly thinks the status quo is preferable to one in which registrants had stronger, less equivocal property interests in names.
The Wikipedia summary of the case suggests that the ruling was much more than it was. Courts tend to rule on narrow issues, as it did here.
The question before the Court was not whether a domain name is a form of property. Both parties agreed that a domain name is a form of property; that wasn't in dispute. The Court did affirm their shared position in black letter law, though.
Rather, the question before the Court was whether, as intangible property, a tort of conversion claim relating to the domain name could be made under California law. Previously, cases disagreed as to whether it could be recognized. The Court found that it could be.
Thanks. That was an excellent summary.
Agreed, but I just wanted to say that essentially every single thing anyone owns is, and has been from the invention of tally marks on clay tablets, an entry in someone's ledger.
Of all the thousands of things I own, as far as I know, only my car and my house exist in anyone else's ledger as belonging to me. Am I missing something?
The money in your bank account?
These domains wouldn't be worth a penny if they came with a disclaimer that they can be deregistered or even taken over at any point. With a bit of luck, somebody could snatch popular last name domains and set up a catch-all mailserver.
People persist in "buying" digital movies e-books, and games despite the fact that they can disappear at any point, without warning, because the seller's license expired or they just feel like discontinuing the service.
They do have such a limitation, because of things like UDRP. It's just that there are maybe some forms of restriction on the processes by which domain names can be involuntarily transferred or seized. But it's a real possibility!
> What they were proposing should really be illegal...
Where?
Everywhere.
Super reasonable proposal.
Now a "{first}.{second}.name" will be really awesome to own.
This is essentially premium real estate now. For us nerds, anyway.
Great job Neil and gang!
Well anyone can buy a second.name if second isn't already registered, and then set up their own first. subdomain, so most visitors aren't going to know the difference in between grandfathered in first.second.name sites and people who just bought second level domains and created their own subdomain.
if you're lucky, you can do something like first.sec.ond
works for many polish people who own ski resorts :)
I remember when delicious.com was just del.icio.us. I miss that site.
My dyslexia would go bonkers.
Can anyone speak to which specific registrars support setting email forwarding settings with these domains?
WHAT‽ I let my "first.last.name" registration expire because of the impending shutdown!
I did notice that my domain kept working past the supposed shutdown date, but I let the domain registration expire.
I'm so mad now! I assume there is no way to get my domain/email forwarding back :(
I suppose I could try to ask the registrar, but I highly doubt they can do anything...
(Edit: I'm not actually mad, but it was annoying to have to move accounts from my first@last.name email to another one)
I don't know about .name specifically, but some registries have a grace period (or multiple) after which you can still renew it. It's worth checking if you're within the time limit.
That's my plan. If they can help then cool, otherwise it's not really a big deal.
They haven't actually stopped taking third level registrations, so get in there before the revised proposal gets submitted approved and implemented
I think they did. I tried to register one just now and couldn't
This is a registrar issue not a registry issue. There are registrars still allowing registration of .name domains as well as transfers in.
First time ive seen ! and ? overlaid. Neat.
For future reference, ‽ is called an interrobang!
And to show off another fun character, for languages like Spanish that start a question with an inverted question mark, there's also ⸘, the inverted interrobang.
Though I find the name some people call it, gnaborretni (interrobang backwards), much sillier.
Interesting! If we were to follow Spanish to name the inverted interrobang it'd be opening (and closing) interrobangs, not gnaborretni, just as we don't have nóicagorretni nor nóicamalcxe :)
I assume you meant sgnaborretni?
It's called an interrobang. Never really took off but still available in unicode.
Definitely email the registrar. Maybe it might work?
Worth a shot.
While it won't lessen your frustration, I applaud your use of the interrobang. That punctuation mark needs wider use.
I'm not really frustrated, but it is annoying that I had to migrate accounts and stuff, but whatever.
And yes, I love the interrobang! Ever since I mapped scroll lock to "compose" on my keyboard, I've had fun typing all sorts of characters :)
I have an auto substitution set up in iOS to automatically replace ?! with ‽ (Same for ellipsis, ... to …)
And, presumably, "!?"?
It's a neat little mark but I don't think it has much of a chance being widespread because I think ?! has already won in real usage and doesn't have the fine detail problem. I think it has a better chance of becoming an official grammatical digraph than the merged mark.
Is there an overlaid ?? and !! mark? (For Chess.)
There's DOUBLE EXCLAMATION MARK[0] and also DOUBLE QUESTION MARK[1] if those will do.
[0] https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/203c/index.htm
[1] https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2047/index.htm
Besides interrobang, Unicode includes all 4 possible sequences of 2 "?" and "!".
203C;DOUBLE EXCLAMATION MARK;Po;0;ON;<compat> 0021 0021;;;;N;;;;; 203D;INTERROBANG;Po;0;ON;;;;;N;;;;; 2047;DOUBLE QUESTION MARK;Po;0;ON;<compat> 003F 003F;;;;N;;;;; 2048;QUESTION EXCLAMATION MARK;Po;0;ON;<compat> 003F 0021;;;;N;;;;; 2049;EXCLAMATION QUESTION MARK;Po;0;ON;<compat> 0021 003F;;;;N;;;;;
I don't think it has much of a chance being widespread
I first heard of it back when Usenet was still the hotness.
Apparently it's been around for close to a century, so if it hasn't caught on widely by now, you're probably right.
> I first heard of it back when Usenet was still the hotness.
This is the first (and probably last) time that I will ever see the words "Usenet" and "hotness" in the same sentence.
Well done, sir.
It lost when computers overtook typewriters.
On a typewriter, you could type one punctuation mark, backspace, and then type another.
Even once computers added the interrobang to Unicode (or older systems), you either need to type in a numeric code, use a secret bucky bit, or select it from a graphical UI, none of which is worth it for more than the odd weirdo with a whimsical streak.
It is best to stick to the main top level domains. I bought into multiple 'new' domains and most of them caused me issues. A few of them jacked up their prices like crazy compared to when I first bought them. They can also be difficult to move between providers.
Unfortunately I am stuck in commitments on a few of these domains and just had to eat the cost increases, the rest I moved to .com/.net.
.consulting was the worst offender.
> It is best to stick to the main top level domains.
Yes, I view most 'new' TLDs as scams. They lure you in with a low price, a rather pricey renewal and then price hike after price hike down the line. They also charge a premium for most dictionary words right from the start.
I wonder why couldn't Verisign just grant most people the second level domains here. I imagine there aren't too many people holding onto 3rd level .name domains here and the set of people holding onto 3rd level domains that share a second level domain with someone else is probably very small, a few hundred at most.
For all the ones holding exclusive second level domains, just give them the second level domain. For all the ones holding shared second levels, offer a buyout and/or allow parties to negotiate with each other on a shared ownership structure of the second level.
I suspect for most of the second level domains, there's only one registrant of a third level domain.
However, I also suspect that for most of the third level domains, they're on a second level domain with multiple registrants. And several of those shared second level domains will have a lot of registrants. If the registrants are in different jurisdictions, it becomes a pretty nasty process to develop international consensus, vs just keeping the status quo going (which IMHO, can't be that hard).
Still, it makes sense to have a process to normalize the single registrant second level domains, because less work.
22,000 third levels total, spread across about 12,000 second levels, about 10,000 of which have only one third level. Of the approximately 2,000 with multiples, many have all of the third level registrants being apparently close relatives.
That leaves quite a few with lots of unrelated registrants, mostly in Japan (tanaka and suzuki being the biggest).
previous discussion on the predecessor post, 69 days ago, 547 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49550772
Nicely done. (I moved a few family email accounts from .name to .net years ago because it was a much cheaper option and the .name TLD was still so uncommon in our bubbles it led to questions when they gave their email addresses to someone else.)
Why would they even want to close it? It is probably close to 0 cost tot hem. Or am I wrong?
It works differently than pretty much every other TLD, which means it's different code paths to support.
Many registrars don't support the unique 3rd level domain setup for .name, so it can be hard to find registrars that properly support it.
There's also an associate email redirect service, which is unique to .name and probably costs money to run and maintain.
It's probably easier to support, and more valuable to sell second level .name domains.
Pretty terrible that they were considering just dropping tens of thousands of customer registrations however.
How is it different than others like .co.jp or .ne.jp?
Those ones have a fixed list of second level domains.
.name was something where you could register a two part domain, picking both the third and second level, to represent your first and last name.
> It works differently than pretty much every other TLD, which means it's different code paths to support.
but I was told that AI has made code obsolete and free
It has weird interactions with some modern browser features. For example domain isolation doesn't apply between subdomains of the same TLD, so john.smith.name and drew.smith.name don't get isolation in naive implementations.
The public suffix list is a stupid hack that should be replaced by formal protocols allowing boundaries to be defined by either DNS entries, or a file on the web server.
The real problem is that we'd have to add a wildcard to the public suffix list. That's it.
The public suffix list is the big list of all the URL suffixes that should not imply shared ownership of all their subdomains. For example the line
com
says "XYZ.com" and "ABC.com" should not be assumed to be controlled by the same entity.
Problem is, all 1st level domains registered to the .name TLD should be added to the list, and that's a lot of domains. The correct answer, IMO, would be to add a wildcard
*.name
but that would involve updating all the code that relies on the public suffix list to support said wildcard.
*.name isn't a good solution either, because the vast majority of registrations are at the second level.
If you want to do it properly, you really do need to include all of the second level domains that have more than one third level registrant. And update that periodically as domains expire... there might be three registrants under .example.name today, but if they all (or all but one) stop paying, example.name is no longer a public suffix and it should be removed.
Having "no cookies shared between subdomains" as a restriction on the entire TLD isn't completely beyond the pale. There are other TLDs that have restrictions, like HTTPS being required for .dev
wouldn't that be a problem with a lot of other domains? like locality domains
It definitely is. <ingress>.k8s.<mydns>.com regularly confuses what password I want to use if I have different authentication per ingress. More commonly if I run something else at <name>.<mydns>.com firefox and chrome are both happy to offer up my password for <other service>.<mydns>.com.
Closed. Wont fix.
We solve that problem with the public suffix list. The problem is there's a lot of .name domains, each of which would need to be added to the list.
yes, but other locality domains are fairly static and well-known
.co.uk wouldn't have the same problem because everyone knows that combo is a TLD in and of itself. with a seemingly infinite possible combinations of blah.name that could be a TLD itself, or, might just be a subdomain of .name, it gets really weird
> with a seemingly infinite possible combinations
Verisign claimed approximately 22,000 third level domains [1] in July 2026. I don't see an estimate of the number of shared second level domains, but it's finite. The current public suffix list includes 10414 names [2]; so at maximum, the list would approximately triple in size --- not ideal, but feasible.
[1] https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/consensus-policies/fessen...
[2] including some with wildcards, re: your other post
My thoughts also, but maybe they can make more from a few sites like baby.name than they can from personal domains.
There would be great money to be made if you could auction off domain.name, instead of being stuck just getting $20 per year because some geezer registered his.domain.name.
A few years ago I was able to register <first name>.<last name> I was so excited until I realized how potentially precarious the domain was. My established domain is <first><last>.<forever tdl>. I'm not too worried about it having a problem (although as some have mentioned here I wish we had more rights, as individuals, to this IP). So I keep the new domain more as a personal toy...
Kind of off-topic, but I wonder what will happen to .io in the end.
Most likely nothing. .su was kept around and it was million times smaller than .io is now.
Vive la résistance!
Resistance is not futile.
> to my lawyers Jan, Flip and Diégo who threw the book at ICANN
Resistance with a strong case and competent lawyers is not futile.
And with a lot of money to burn.
Congrats!!
The title of this submission is misleading. This is only for "3rd level" .name domains. The title makes it seem like normal .name domains were being deleted.
I have bought my *.name domain a decade ago? Why was this ever a thing? Was there some limitation i'm to stupid to get or did one company just register some common last names?
for specifically third level registrations
Congrats to those wanting to keep their domains! I'm surprised they went with perpetual (well, as much as anything is) support, i.e. allowing renewals and such rather than just letting it naturally expire (the initial proposal was to immediately cease these records at a given date with no clear communication on how they'd be protected or not from re-registering the upper level domains or not).
How does one register a domain under .name ? I can’t find info through search because it discards the dot no matter what I try.
Start from the TLD lists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom... led to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.name led to https://www.verisign.com/domain-names/name-domains
Same as any gTLD, pick your favorite registrar and they probably support it. Give your registrar money, they'll give the registry money and boom. (more or less)
When .name was new, you may have needed to contract with the registry directly, it was an early new gTLD and I don't remember if they started with the registry/registrar split or not.
Afaik, new registrants are not able to register a third level domain, but second level domains have been available for a long time.
Available under standard registrars that offer many TLDs, like inwx.com: https://www.inwx.com/en/domain/check?domain=testtest123.name...
but which support the actual third-level domains? for example, my last name is already taken as a .name domain by verisign, what if i want my firstname.lastname.name domain?
Gandi and 007names are the only ones I'm aware of that support the third-level domains.
The third-level domains are still being discontinued, it’s just that people who already have one get to keep it.
You'd have to try to find the contact that owns lastname.name and work out a private deal - you won't get ICANN protections though.
One can't (officially) register such 3rd level domains anywhere anymore.
It's just a combination in the ambiguity of what "it discards the dot" should mean in GGP's message combined with the article already clarifying 3rd level domains are not available on .name anymore leading to a lot of confused comments.
Did you read the link?
"Although they will be closing new registrations for 3rd-level .name domains, all existing domains (including this website) and email redirects will remain indefinitely."
They were apparently planning on shutting down the whole TLD. They will be leaving it up for existing registrants, but not allowing new registrations.
No, they were not planning that. This is only about 3rd level domain as the paragraph you quoted says. Every other TLD don't sell those (afaik). Normally "someone.name" would be a domain, and they would own all the subdomains. .name allowed you to register "one.someone.name" and "two.someone.name" as completely separated domains with completely separated owners. I understand why they should grandfather in existing domains but this was just madness.
Ah, fair enough. I kind of thought that third level domain registration was the whole point of the .name TLD, so I was interpreting it as shutting it down.
So the weird part then comes in: are all second level domains that have third level registrations now reserved? Do they stop being reserved if the last third level registration expires without being renewed?
> So the weird part then comes in: are all second level domains that have third level registrations now reserved? Do they stop being reserved if the last third level registration expires without being renewed?
Yes, second level domains that overlap with a registered third level domain have never been available. Under the original proposal, once all the third level domains were dropped, the overlapping second level domains would have been available (first come, first served). I believe current practice is the second level domain becomes available if all of the third level domains expire. Registrants in other threads indicated that there's no process to have an orderly transition from being the only the registrant of a third level domain under a specific second level name to registering that second level domain ... you would have to let your current name expire and hope to catch the second level name.
> I kind of thought that third level domain registration was the whole point of the .name TLD
It was initially! But there was enough demand for second-level registrations that they opened that up too (and set the stage for this whole mess).
Good question. Yeah no idea - the email linked in OP says they're going to send a new proposal, I'm assuming it will cover how they're planning to handle it. And I guess that yes blocking second level domains that have a third level already registered is the pragmatic choice.
I want to edit this comment.
I've had a .name for almost a decade now and was not aware of it's history.
Shame I didn't register on my lastname .name , I had thought it was a much newer gTLD.
Certainly nice to know they would've almost certainly proceeded as normal if the concerns didn't blow up online
They shouldnt this easy to take away tbh
> thanks to ... Jim who flew to Bali to make the case to ICANN in person
What the heck is ICANN doing in Bali of all places?
Its where their yearly general meeting was hosted: https://meetings.icann.org/en/meetings/icann87/
Last year it was in Spain and the year before it was in Mumbai.
It's NGO pork disguised as woke inclusion. Meetings in Africa or Asia Pacific are (theoretically) cheaper for historically disadvantaged people to attend.
Good for them. I just wish I could register a new .yu domain…
Thousands of .name owners nearly became .gone owners. Nice to see Verisign choose the one migration plan every engineer secretly loves: don’t migrate anything.
I wonder how much the midterm elections influenced Verisign in this decision to bend the knee in this "David v Goliath"-esque win.
I was expecting for Verisign to take this to court, drag it out, and bleed the opposing party out. I suppose the judges that Verisign lawyers depend on did not get favorable re-election.
Ofc it’s probably something less nefarious, and boring. Verisign probably did some basic math and determined that taking this to court with their army of overpaid lawyers was simply not cost effective compared to just supporting 3rd level domains.
glad this got resolved, bummer it was thrown into question at all
https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/consensus-policies/kane-t...
Success is possible. Well done to all.
If you are into stories about weird and obscure domain happenings: https://eualternative.eu/guides/bulgaria-bg-private-registry...
So glad this happened. When I first heard, I assumed that all the folks wronged would simply be disregarded even though Verisign was blatantly breaking consumer protection laws (I assume. If it wasn't, those laws are incomplete). The fact that Verisign even tried still makes me upset though. It's really annoying what several companies will do as long as their hand isn't forced due to legal or social repercussions
It's disappointing that only .name got this treatment. ICANN should grandfather all domains. The idea that it's perfectly fine for domains to just disappear is ridiculous.
I'm glad that the article writer got his domain back, but I wish we had a better term than "grandfathered". The origin of this term goes back to Jim Crow, when to stop Black people and newcomers from voting, many places in the American South imposed a near-impossible test you had to pass to register to vote, but also added a loophole: if your grandfather voted in your county (or sometimes your state), you could vote without taking the test. This was called the grandfather clause.
This sort of priggishness belongs in the past, let it be
"Legacied"
So, turns out Verisign is not the Devil incarnate?
Why do you think that???
The Devil is no match for a sufficiently talented attorney
c.f. Benét: https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0602901h.html
In 1997, this was explored in a documentary featuring Keanu Reeves.