"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.
> 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.
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?
I would find that hard to believe. You have a bank account, surely. A life insurance policy? Airline points? An account with the government social security office for your pension? There are probably dozens (if not hundreds) of things of value (even if the value is near zero) that exist in someone else's ledger.
But equally hundreds if not thousands of things a typical person owns isn't recorded in any ledger. The personal laptop currently in my lap, my clothes, my furniture, my pen and notebook, the cash in my wallet
Saying all ownership are just ledger entries is just as reductive as saying no ownership can be reduced to ledger entries
This is too reductive. There's been real development behind what it means to own something. What's written in a ledger is just an inscription it has no meaning outside of its social context.
Our social understanding of property has changed. John Locke's ideas on private property are so fundamental to how we think about ownership that we don't even realize there would have been another way of thinking about how we own things.
> for now a domain you "own" is just an entry in someone else's ledger
Well yes, that is literally what you are purchasing after all. Else alternative DNS schemes such as GNS would presumably be made illegal in the event they shadowed any "owned" mark. I don't think anyone would want to live in a world where adding an entry to your hosts file was a crime.
ICANN DNS can be approximately described as renting an entry in a global equivalent of the yellow pages.
That said, strong digital ownership laws would be a good thing. Publishers (games, books, music, etc) shouldn't be permitted to yank titles you paid for on the basis that you only licensed them. Neither should registries of names, ICANN or otherwise.
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.
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.
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.
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 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
It's not 22000 registrants for .name, it's 22000 registrants of third level domains. There's lots more second level registrations in .name; it is massively more popular to register a second level domain, but it wasn't always an option.
The "real" problem is the public suffix list. All domains should be considered public, that is, a sub domain gains no trust from it's parent domain.
There is a good argument that the public suffix list should be distributed via dns, and it is easy to propose a scheme for it. Two I know of are. A specific public suffix record marking a domain public or private. The presence of a soa record which already transfers the authority of a doamin, should be used to determine if that domain is public or private.
But private unless in some third party list is the worst way to handle it.
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.
I personally think the public suffix list should be replaced by zero sharing even amongst subdomains, and if you want to talk between x.y.example.org and example.org you can use CORS just like any other cross-domain request.
Do it for every new TLD. Do it for every new domain in an existing TLD. Add an opt-in for security, then start pushing for the security measure, then get browsers to start carrot-and-stick enforcing it...
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.
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
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).
It's NGO pork disguised as woke inclusion. Meetings in Africa or Asia Pacific are (theoretically) cheaper for historically disadvantaged people to attend.
Counterpoint: Bali is a place with internet. The internet is a global thing. I like that the meetings move around.
I’m not sure how the people of Bali are “historically disadvantaged.” From what perspective? Where I live, comparatively, I am historically disadvantaged in my access to nice sunny beaches.
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.
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'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, you could vote without taking the test. This was called the grandfather clause.
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?
144 comments
[ 0.17 ms ] story [ 81.4 ms ] threadSuccess is possible. Well done to all.
.name Termination - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49550772 - Sept 2026 (547 comments)
Resistance is not futile.
Shame I didn't register on my lastname .name , I had thought it was a much newer gTLD.
"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.
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...
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 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.
I suppose the fact we pay for them annually reflects that we're merely the renters, not owners of the domains.
This model also makes it possible for companies/brands to take over ownership of the domains they feel they're entitled to.
Your credit/debit cards (really your credit card accounts) will show up as yours in some bank database.
Your laptop may show up as your in some Apple/Microsoft/Google account.
Saying all ownership are just ledger entries is just as reductive as saying no ownership can be reduced to ledger entries
Our social understanding of property has changed. John Locke's ideas on private property are so fundamental to how we think about ownership that we don't even realize there would have been another way of thinking about how we own things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_property#History
Well yes, that is literally what you are purchasing after all. Else alternative DNS schemes such as GNS would presumably be made illegal in the event they shadowed any "owned" mark. I don't think anyone would want to live in a world where adding an entry to your hosts file was a crime.
ICANN DNS can be approximately described as renting an entry in a global equivalent of the yellow pages.
That said, strong digital ownership laws would be a good thing. Publishers (games, books, music, etc) shouldn't be permitted to yank titles you paid for on the basis that you only licensed them. Neither should registries of names, ICANN or otherwise.
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.
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.
This is essentially premium real estate now. For us nerds, anyway.
Great job Neil and gang!
works for many polish people who own ski resorts :)
Where?
See: the UN
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.
but I was told that AI has made code obsolete and free
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.
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.
It'd be one thing if it was there since the beginning, like https for .dev, but it would probably break existing sites if you add it after the fact.
There is a good argument that the public suffix list should be distributed via dns, and it is easy to propose a scheme for it. Two I know of are. A specific public suffix record marking a domain public or private. The presence of a soa record which already transfers the authority of a doamin, should be used to determine if that domain is public or private.
But private unless in some third party list is the worst way to handle it.
It's possible to make things better.
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...
What the heck is ICANN doing in Bali of all places?
I’m not sure how the people of Bali are “historically disadvantaged.” From what perspective? Where I live, comparatively, I am historically disadvantaged in my access to nice sunny beaches.
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.