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kiesel 4 hours ago [-]
Worth noting, this doesn't affect domain.name, thus 2nd level domains. I was actually unaware you could directly register a 3rd level domain... Got my .name in the sunrise phase of .name, though it later rendered obsolete by name change on marriage (but still got it).
pelagicAustral 3 hours ago [-]
Biggest rug pull in the history of dns
InsidiousWombat 2 hours ago [-]
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.
hoppp 7 minutes ago [-]
This. Happened to me a few times.
I get a cheap domain for allegedly $1 renew and then get charged for $10 because they changed their minds.
It should be illegal.
> 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.
cowlevel 39 minutes ago [-]
Definitely not. No company ever refunds unless you sue them, they're worried you'll sue them, or they want a good reputation, and domain registries do not care about reputation because they are monopolies. Registrars might, a little, but it's not up to them.
wodenokoto 3 hours ago [-]
Wait, so if you own Johnson.name you and use John.Johnson.name as your web address, that will stop working?
OJFord 2 hours ago [-]
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)
PufPufPuf 21 minutes ago [-]
Which is an insane scheme to begin with. Why not "john-johnson.name"?
OtomotO 2 hours ago [-]
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
victorbjorklund 3 hours ago [-]
Unrelated. What happened with .io? Didn’t they say they would disappear or did that change?
Symbiote 3 hours ago [-]
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.
That approval would likely have been considered a mere formality under other administrations, but unfortunately intersected with the current administration's obsession over territory...
bbg2401 1 hours ago [-]
It should never have been a mere formality anyway.
swiftcoder 5 minutes ago [-]
Yes it should. We're not typically concerned in the self-determination of small islands halfway around the globe (well, except for Guam and the Marshall islands...), and it's an issue entirely between the UK and a former colony.
mindaslab 3 days ago [-]
Why re they doing this? Looks stupid to me.
nikanj 3 days ago [-]
By kicking old nerds off legacy.domain.name, they can relist domain.name on the open market and make an absolute killing.
layer8 17 minutes ago [-]
If even only two people would be interested in foo.example.name and bar.example.name, they could make more of a killing with the old scheme. Apparently such interest is lacking.
PufPufPuf 20 minutes ago [-]
And they don't do refunds if you prepaid!
cowlevel 39 minutes ago [-]
This is the reason.
Giorgi 1 hours ago [-]
Soo... people actually used it?
cpach 39 minutes ago [-]
Not very many, but yes
BrandoElFollito 40 minutes ago [-]
I had a .name domain since its birth. Then proceeded to loose it because of bad luck and bad planning.
I tried to retrieve it but after a week of back and forth exchanges (mostly back from my side) I gave up.
Moved to .fr hoping that it will be stable (price wise) as a national TLD - so far so good.
layer8 25 minutes ago [-]
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.)
toomuchtodo 3 days ago [-]
Consider editing title to be "Tell HN:" Thank you for the PSA!
nikanj 3 days ago [-]
Good point, changed. Thanks!
mnd999 3 hours ago [-]
I have a second level and I’m in the process too. This kind of shitty behaviour warrants bankruptcy.
OtomotO 2 hours ago [-]
tbh, as an owner of a .name (tld) I don't understand how this worked in the real world.
I have subdomains like {myfirstname}.{lastname}.name ... {lastname}.name is mine
So obviously {myfirstname}.{lastname}.name is a subdomain...
Could someone now have bought {myfirstname}.{lastname}.name and DNS would go to their page?
If so, I find the new behaviour way more sane...
If I wanted to sell a subdomain, I could do this, no questions asked. I just point the subdomain to another IP.
But I pay for {lastname}.name so it should be mine, just like any other .tld I have!
wakamoleguy 1 hours ago [-]
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.
Meleagris 1 hours ago [-]
Ok. But why would anyone buy a third level domain when they could have bought the second level? It’s a strange thing.
Were the third level domains cheaper?
Me personally, it wouldn’t even occur to me to register a third level directly, because why bother when you can have the second level and do whatever you want with it.
Super strange.
chrismorgan 53 minutes ago [-]
Third-level registration was how it was designed. Second-level was added later.
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.
edent 3 hours ago [-]
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.
dspillett 3 hours ago [-]
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.
moron4hire 2 hours ago [-]
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.
cowlevel 37 minutes ago [-]
You probably mean registry.
Symbiote 2 hours ago [-]
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?
jl6 27 minutes ago [-]
It’s so ad hoc that we need to maintain reference datasets to identify what’s registrable:
.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.
TZubiri 3 hours ago [-]
there’s nothing special about any level of domains, it was always a hierarchical protocol
jeroenhd 2 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!
singpolyma3 2 hours ago [-]
They wouldn't need to "do that" that's how it already works. They're actively undoing that
I get a cheap domain for allegedly $1 renew and then get charged for $10 because they changed their minds. It should be illegal.
Wonder if registrars will refund to people's cards.
At least I hope this is the case. I have a memorial page for my uncle under hisfirstname.ourlastname.name
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian_Ocean_Territory
I tried to retrieve it but after a week of back and forth exchanges (mostly back from my side) I gave up.
Moved to .fr hoping that it will be stable (price wise) as a national TLD - so far so good.
(I’m excluding restricted-use TLDs like .edu here.)
I have subdomains like {myfirstname}.{lastname}.name ... {lastname}.name is mine
So obviously {myfirstname}.{lastname}.name is a subdomain...
Could someone now have bought {myfirstname}.{lastname}.name and DNS would go to their page?
If so, I find the new behaviour way more sane...
If I wanted to sell a subdomain, I could do this, no questions asked. I just point the subdomain to another IP.
But I pay for {lastname}.name so it should be mine, just like any other .tld I have!
There were also some shenanigans around automatic email routing in that case.
Were the third level domains cheaper?
Me personally, it wouldn’t even occur to me to register a third level directly, because why bother when you can have the second level and do whatever you want with it.
Super strange.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.name
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.
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.
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.
Should we mention fourth-level domains, like ci.east-palo-alto.ca.us or stanborough.herts.sch.uk?
https://publicsuffix.org/
A real mess.
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.
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!