This should not be allowed. It means (a) one TLD does not operate at the most fundamental level like the others; (b) all of the individuals who are using third-level .name domains are left high and dry
I read the PDF, and thought I understood, but you're asking a good question. I did some research, and it turns out that when .name launched in 2001 (under Global Name Registry), it used this really weird shared-SLD architecture where the registry retained the second-level domain (e.g., rpdillon.name) and sold independent third-level domains (e.g. bob.rpdillon.name and jane.rpdillon.name) to completely unrelated individuals through ICANN registrars.
I've managed multiple third-level domains for decades, and didn't realize this distinction between registry-managed domains and having the registry delegate third-level domains to the authoritative servers...the latter I'm quite used to, but this change is about the former.
I've never used .name, and while I was initially skeptical, it seems like this is a pretty reasonable move.
I cofounded Nameplanet, which morphed into GNR, and my name is in the ICANN docs for .name...
Basically, .name came out of us starting out as a webmail provider offering people to pick from ca. 60k domain names covering most common last names, because one of my co-founders and I both had firstname@lastname.tld email addresses.
When ICANN opened up for new TLDs we decided to try to offer the same more broadly.
So it wasn't just the registration, but initially also email forwarding..
None of the first batch of TLDs did as well as projected, and demand for .name was well below what we'd hoped, sadly.
For .name, it was a match of less demand than we thought and people not getting the third level thing, which led to eventually abandoning it (after I'd moved on).
We ended up selling to Verisign a few years later.
thanks for trying, fwiw it made a beautiful domain for java source code back in the day. i hope you can do a long form retrospective on the .name story someday
do you think there's any point in contacting ICANN or Verisign? i'd be sad to lose mine!
it's wild how long some third level domains are still pre-registered for and how little an email forward must cost to run (at the sub-registrar level?)
It can't hurt to try to contact someone, but I doubt Verisign would listen. Already back then (we contracted them to run the registry backend, over my objections) they were stuffed full of bureaucrats.
I left back in 2003, so can really only talk about the origin. By 2003 we cut staff massively, and after completing a reference registrar playform laying off most of my team there wasn't really much left for me to do... The guy I originally got the shared domain idea with stuck around with a few of the early developers. Our other co-founders were out at that point.
Most of the fun was the initial mail platform and the registrar platform, both of which leaned heavily on qmail - the latter as a queuing system to decouple everything. Email as a messaging bus works very well...
Kinda, it's a slight variation of that from what I can tell. E.g. you can't go and register john.smith.uk because it's arbitrary.fixed.fixed rather than arbitrary.arbitrary.fixed. You can do something like john.smith.co.uk, but only if you have registered smith.co.uk or they delegate to you.
It's an odd concept. I have to say I hadn't really thought of it before reading this.
i'm 60% sure that anyone can get a .uk domain. police.uk and nhs.uk are the only ones i can think of off the top of my head, but those might be 3TLDs hosts tbf
That's arbitrary.fixed, which is something also slightly different.
I know this sounds absolutely absurd and your mind must be screaming "so just get arbitrary.fixed and assign yourself whatever.aribtrary.fixed?" at you... but stick with me and I can say with, dare I say, 61% confidence what .name was doing will make you think "uh - ok, yeah I guess" :).
If you own smith.uk then great - you can be john.smith.uk. What about Jim Smith in the UK? Is he supposed to just reach out to John Smith and ask for jim.smith.uk to be delegated to him? What about the thousands of other (anything but John) Smiths, are they just supposed to pester John and ask if he'll delegate the name? What if Jane Doe doesn't want to delegate to other Does? What if Bob Johnson does and then dies - lapsing the renewal? It's all a big mess because one person is assigned arbitrary.tld.
That's where arbitrary.arbitrary.tld comes in. arbitrary.tld is managed by the Registrar, now thousands of different people can get their john.smith.tld and jane.doe.tld without having to worry about who controls arbitrary.tld any more than they worry about who controls tld.
That's what .name was, and why neither arbitrary.co.uk or arbitrary.uk really fit the bill.
Are there registrants in the third-level today? It doesn't appear so. The application filled in every single blank with "no problem lol" making it appear that zero customers or registrants will be affected, like at all. So, was anyone taking advantage of this service? They will immediately be terminating the service and so, if anyone was renting space thusly, will have a very narrow window to transition service. But yes, registering "N.N.name" without directly registering "N.name" seemed like a bonkers way to run things.
Why? The .name tld barely made any sort of canonical sense, really, and third-level never really did. I mean aside from the fact that some people just 'liked it'.
Instead of registering your.name you would register first.last.name (nobody owned last.name). This was intended to allow more people to have personal domains with fewer conflicts.
Now, years later, they are undoing it and they're even breaking existing domains. ("existing third level domain names will be terminated") This kind of breaking change shouldn't be allowed.
Wait, if it was only firstname.lastname.name, how was he able to register firstnamelastname.name? Does it let you register 2nd level domains if you get there before someone else registers a 3rd level domain that uses the 2nd level domain that you want to register?
I don't know the history of when the offerings were available, but I initially bought my-first-name.my-rare-last-name.name, and fortunately nobody else bought another-name.my-rare-last-name.name, and I was able to let mine lapse then buy my-rare-last-name.name.
As someone cruising under something like silly.domain.name, I'm very stressed if they delete existing domains. I've had mine for over 20 year, so the number of services I've registered under that email are endless
Can't anyone set up a "registrar" for a subdomain of a domain they already use? They control the DNS record, right? Why is ICANN even involved here?
I don't see how this is any different, other than the second-level domain owner delegates their registrar job to the first-level domain owner.
There is something weird though if you control smith.name, that you don't control john.smith.name. The DNS system does convey some indirect concept of responsibility.
You can register both second (example.name) and third (first.last.name) level .name domains. However, once a third level name is registered, they reserve the parent second level domain.
ICANN is involved because Verisign is the registry operator for .name, and the contract between ICANN and Verisign gives ICANN some oversight power over Verisign's registry services. This includes some fairly limited oversight power over what they call "voluntary services", which are services that the registry provides that are not required to be provided by the contract. Apparently the registration of 3rd level domains and the email forwarding service are voluntary services, not services that Verisign is obligated to offer by the contract.
"2.1. What effect, if any, will the proposed service have on the life cycle of domain names?
None. There will not be any effect on the life cycle of domain names."
Well, aside from deleting all of them. But no other effect on the life cycle.
"3.6. Have you communicated with any of the entities whose products or services might be affected by the introduction of your proposed service? If so, please describe the communications.
No. Not applicable."
I guess communication is not applicable when you just cease a service.
I have used a third-level .name domain as my primary domain and email since 2005, and I am in this list of domains affected. This is the first I have heard of this, does anyone have information on _when_ this might occur?
In the RSEP it states:
> "Have you communicated with any of the entities whose products or services might be affected by the introduction of your proposed service? If so, please describe the
communications."
> "No. Not applicable."
As thankful as I am to OP for bringing this to my attention; I am equally disappointed that my registrar (Fasthosts) has not made any attempt to warn me about this, and that Verisign consider me "Not applicable" to a change that will be extremely onerous.
90 days to transition is an extremely short period of time to transition literally every account I have, including email addresses I use for government and medical services.
I think you’re misreading it: there are two parts to the question, “No.” answers the first part, and because of that the second part is “Not applicable.” They should have just written “No.”
This is rather silly. Third level domains aren't particularly unique or hard to do. It likely costs about nothing to just deprecate new registrations and keep the existing ones around.
If I had to guess, they're wanting to auction off the second level domains which will likely bring in more money than the rather unpopular third level registrations.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 10.1 ms ] threadI've managed multiple third-level domains for decades, and didn't realize this distinction between registry-managed domains and having the registry delegate third-level domains to the authoritative servers...the latter I'm quite used to, but this change is about the former.
I've never used .name, and while I was initially skeptical, it seems like this is a pretty reasonable move.
Basically, .name came out of us starting out as a webmail provider offering people to pick from ca. 60k domain names covering most common last names, because one of my co-founders and I both had firstname@lastname.tld email addresses.
When ICANN opened up for new TLDs we decided to try to offer the same more broadly.
So it wasn't just the registration, but initially also email forwarding..
None of the first batch of TLDs did as well as projected, and demand for .name was well below what we'd hoped, sadly.
For .name, it was a match of less demand than we thought and people not getting the third level thing, which led to eventually abandoning it (after I'd moved on).
We ended up selling to Verisign a few years later.
do you think there's any point in contacting ICANN or Verisign? i'd be sad to lose mine!
it's wild how long some third level domains are still pre-registered for and how little an email forward must cost to run (at the sub-registrar level?)
I left back in 2003, so can really only talk about the origin. By 2003 we cut staff massively, and after completing a reference registrar playform laying off most of my team there wasn't really much left for me to do... The guy I originally got the shared domain idea with stuck around with a few of the early developers. Our other co-founders were out at that point.
Most of the fun was the initial mail platform and the registrar platform, both of which leaned heavily on qmail - the latter as a queuing system to decouple everything. Email as a messaging bus works very well...
The email platform we started with was C++ CGI
i'm going to send a few old fashioned letters. my registrar said only, we can't give legal advice, ICANN going to ICANN ;)
It's an odd concept. I have to say I hadn't really thought of it before reading this.
I know this sounds absolutely absurd and your mind must be screaming "so just get arbitrary.fixed and assign yourself whatever.aribtrary.fixed?" at you... but stick with me and I can say with, dare I say, 61% confidence what .name was doing will make you think "uh - ok, yeah I guess" :).
If you own smith.uk then great - you can be john.smith.uk. What about Jim Smith in the UK? Is he supposed to just reach out to John Smith and ask for jim.smith.uk to be delegated to him? What about the thousands of other (anything but John) Smiths, are they just supposed to pester John and ask if he'll delegate the name? What if Jane Doe doesn't want to delegate to other Does? What if Bob Johnson does and then dies - lapsing the renewal? It's all a big mess because one person is assigned arbitrary.tld.
That's where arbitrary.arbitrary.tld comes in. arbitrary.tld is managed by the Registrar, now thousands of different people can get their john.smith.tld and jane.doe.tld without having to worry about who controls arbitrary.tld any more than they worry about who controls tld.
That's what .name was, and why neither arbitrary.co.uk or arbitrary.uk really fit the bill.
(via https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/reconsideration-26-2-s...)
contrary, this is one TLD _ceasing_ a idiosyncratic mode of operation.
i've been a third level domain customer since 2006 not amused at all
Now, years later, they are undoing it and they're even breaking existing domains. ("existing third level domain names will be terminated") This kind of breaking change shouldn't be allowed.
That was the starting point - we started as a webmail provider letting people share lastname.sometld domains
Without that, it's just another name.
Sounds like a win to me if you play your cards right.
I don't see how this is any different, other than the second-level domain owner delegates their registrar job to the first-level domain owner.
There is something weird though if you control smith.name, that you don't control john.smith.name. The DNS system does convey some indirect concept of responsibility.
ICANN is involved because Verisign is the registry operator for .name, and the contract between ICANN and Verisign gives ICANN some oversight power over Verisign's registry services. This includes some fairly limited oversight power over what they call "voluntary services", which are services that the registry provides that are not required to be provided by the contract. Apparently the registration of 3rd level domains and the email forwarding service are voluntary services, not services that Verisign is obligated to offer by the contract.
None. There will not be any effect on the life cycle of domain names."
Well, aside from deleting all of them. But no other effect on the life cycle.
"3.6. Have you communicated with any of the entities whose products or services might be affected by the introduction of your proposed service? If so, please describe the communications. No. Not applicable."
I guess communication is not applicable when you just cease a service.
In the RSEP it states:
> "Have you communicated with any of the entities whose products or services might be affected by the introduction of your proposed service? If so, please describe the communications."
> "No. Not applicable."
As thankful as I am to OP for bringing this to my attention; I am equally disappointed that my registrar (Fasthosts) has not made any attempt to warn me about this, and that Verisign consider me "Not applicable" to a change that will be extremely onerous.
90 days to transition is an extremely short period of time to transition literally every account I have, including email addresses I use for government and medical services.
If I had to guess, they're wanting to auction off the second level domains which will likely bring in more money than the rather unpopular third level registrations.