> 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.
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 are 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 could be made against it under California law. Previously, cases disagreed as to whether it could be recognized. The Court found that it could be.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
"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.
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 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.
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
> 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 are 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 could be made against it under California law. Previously, cases disagreed as to whether it could be recognized. The Court found that it could be.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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 :)
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 have an auto substitution set up in iOS to automatically replace ?! with ‽ (Same for ellipsis, ... to …)
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 :)
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.)
Besides interrobang, Unicode includes all 4 possible sequences of 2 "?" and "!".
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.
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.
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.
wouldn't that be a problem with a lot of other domains? like locality domains
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
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.
My thoughts also, but maybe they can make more from a few sites like baby.name than they can from personal domains.
previous discussion on the predecessor post, 69 days ago, 547 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49550772
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.
They shouldnt this easy to take away tbh
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?
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.
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.
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'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.
> 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.
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.
Certainly nice to know they would've almost certainly proceeded as normal if the concerns didn't blow up online
Good for them. I just wish I could register a new .yu domain…
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
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.