Tell HN: Remember to migrate away from .name domain
If you have a third.level.name domain, it'll get permanently expunged next year. Have you successfully taken steps to migrate away? Did you move to a standard .com domain, or are you taking your chances with another .tld?
Personally, I'm stuck in Microsoft hell because Azure admin emails cannot be changed and support is both uncaring and powerless.
85 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 21.5 ms ] threadWonder if registrars will refund to people's cards.
I get a cheap domain for allegedly $1 renew and then get charged for $10 because they changed their minds. It should be illegal.
The crazy thing to me is that a lot of people see first-year prices for vanity domains and don’t seem to understand that the math doesn’t "math" if they’re going to keep the site for more than a couple of years.
They'll acquire an .app, .xyz, or .lol for a buck without realizing that in as little as two-three years, they’ve already spent the same amount as they would on a standard top-level domain like .com, .org, or .net. And now they're just losing money after that...
And there are first-year promotions for .com, too: currently a few registrars are offering one for $3-ish, although this is usually limited to one domain per account.
From the other side, why should the EU allow someone outside the EU to hold onto a domain that a person within the EU might want or benefit from?
They should let people keep it because it was bought under the correct circumstances and it's very disruptive to rip away a domain name while harmless to let a very tiny fraction escape that way.
> it's very disruptive
Britain leaving the EU was very disruptive. I don’t see why the EU should alter their rules to accommodate British citizens. It doesn’t seem like responsibility of easing the disruption should fall at all to the EU when Britain created the disruption.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
https://publicsuffix.org/
A real mess.
https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/issues/2306
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.
It was a bit odd, but well intentioned.
Later in a desperate search for MORE MONEY, they opened up 2nd level if no 3rd level already existed under that 2nd. This sounds less like another search for more money with new sales as people are saying, but a reduction in unique domain handling and cost cutting (they can shutdown all those email redirection servers).
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.)
Although it is weird to have a registrar where you get to pick both the second and the third level freely.
Delegating multiple levels down is allowed by DNS spec but almost never done, and causes problems. For starters, some registrars just straight up did not handle the first.last.name case at all. Which is particularly bad for .name because originally, you could only register third-level domains. Only later did .name added second-level domain registration.
This creates an obvious collision problem: if John Doe registers john.doe.name first, and then Jane Doe wants to register doe.name, what happens?
You might think that, obviously, both registrations stick. But this means John Doe owns a subdomain of Jane Doe's namespace, that Jane Doe cannot get rid of or otherwise control. When someone looks up records on john.doe.name, doe.name is never queried; .name skips it. This causes all sorts of problems for cookies: John Doe can now set cookies on Jane Doe's website, and Jane Doe's website always sets cookies that John Doe's website can read[0].
The time-reversed scenario (John Doe registers after Jane Doe) is even worse. Obviously, top-level domain operators should not be allowed to project subdomains onto other people's registrations like this. Like, imagine if Verisign decided you could register subdomains on someone else's domain, that they did not control and could not get rid of, if you paid them a little extra? There would be all sorts of shenanigans.
The alternative resolution is confiscation: when Jane Doe registers doe.name, John Doe loses his website. This is more in line with how you thought it was working. And, indeed, what Verisign is planning to do is basically this en masse, dropping all the third-level delegations. Probably because the operational headaches of managing two different conflicting delegation schemes was too much.
[0] This is actually a problem for any DNS suffix that is shared across multiple websites; there's a Public Suffix List that exists specifically to keep you from, say, writing cookies to .com that hit every website. But doe.name isn't exactly a public suffix: it's Jane Doe's personal website, one that just happens to have a suffix collision with another website because of a stupid idea someone had.
I actually thought that one of the two registrations would be denied.
The only (somewhat) sane way I see how a registrar could offer both 2nd and 3rd level domains at the same time would be to keep them entirely separate:
Maintain two lists: One is a list of ordinary 2nd level domains that were directly sold, say something like whatsina.name.
The other would be a list of "commons" 2nd level domains that cannot be sold, because people own individual 3rd level domains on it, like doe.name above.
Which domain belongs to which list would realistically be first-come first-serve: If Jane Doe got there first and purchased doe.name, it would become a directly sold domain, and John Doe's (and also Jack Doe's) registration requests for john.doe.name and jack.doe.name would be denied.
Conversely, if John Doe got his registration for john.doe.name through first, doe.name would become a "commons" domain and Jane Doe's request would be denied, but Jack Doe's request for jack.doe.name would still get through.
But apparently this wasn't how it was handled?
First off, it means selling doe.name separate from john.doe.name is literally impossible, because the e-mail forwarder only works if doe.name publishes the correct MX records. You cannot half-delegate a domain by record type, so .name can't shadow doe.name's MX record. So you're entirely correct that one of the two registrations gets denied because that's literally the only way the mail forwarder still works.
Second, it means hell for VeriSign's backend systems engineers. Along with the list separation you mentioned, any time someone registers first.last.name, it needs to also create a parallel registration for last.name, publish MX records on the corresponding subzone, and spin up a new mail server to forward mail for people who own a subdomain of last.name. I suspect this is part of why VeriSign wants to kill third-level domains more than anything else.
Were they charging a fractional rate since you were getting a fractional domain? If it was $3 USD per year, I could see the appeal for some.
Obviously just a matter of taste and didn’t even spent 3s thinking about any possible repercussions.
Version has a number of domain names like fraser.name under which people could register for something.fraser.name. Verisign will remove those, so if you registered a third level domain from Verisign, that's when you need to migrate away
Also, you can change Azure admin emails. Not sure what you're on about. There's no such thing as unchangeable email addresses in Azure in the way you are making believe. I think I know what you mean but even then there's a way to change things.
Don't be an alarmist because you're ignorant.
And trust me, I know email addresses saved in a database can be changed. The problem is convincing Azure’s outsourced techsupport of that.