But I didn't think about the 1st level competitors. There'd still need a mechanism to resolve that...
1. First come first serve? (e.g. whoever registered a y.name first, whether x is bob or sue is determined by the earliest registrant on record) 2. Lottery/random selection? 3. Bidding war?
I think the problem is 2nd level domains who have the same name will be a problem when they find out all these other 3rd level are now expiring and can run a route to spoof? Likely wouldn't happen, but with the fuckery in the DNS that can happen... This is such a rash and weird decision to push through so quickly just because engineers find it "easier" while ignoring the implications of the move, seemingly when it comes to larger scale security.
I assume there would have to be some method to prevent routing of third level domains to subdomains of two-levels... (or is that just me being a fool yet again, assuming we have competent administration of our systems).
Yes. I've been asking VeriSign for this for years, and they always refused.
I have myname .name - so I thought that was going away. Granted I barely use it, but still it would be annoying. I didn't recall there were 3rd level domains there.
There is no subdomain/TLD bit
What I understand would be the following:
1- Verisign manages the TLD registry for .name (and others), which includes managing the authoritative DNS servers (as pointed to by the .name NS and A records on the root DNS servers), 2- as well as for updating the NS records of .name records it is authoritative at the request of registrars (like, say GoDaddy), which act on behalf of domain owners. 3- one or some of the domain owners, for example for fraser.name, acted as a registry themselves managing authoritative DNS servers for NS records of .fraser.name domains, these third level DNS servers being pointed to by the name. NS records.
4- Upon registration of a .name domain, verisign charged a fee, (in the case of .coms this is around 10$ currently I believe, not sure how much they charge), and ICANN charges a much lesser fee (like 20 cents).
5- Upon registration of a .fraser.name domain, the fraser.name domain owner charged a fee, and they kept the totality of that fee (potentially paying a fee to ICANN, but definitely not to verisign.)
6- Verisign issues this request, requesting registrars of second level domains (domain.tld) like GoDaddy, to stop selling third level domains of this TLD (domain.2ld.tld).
This is my understanding of the situation, and in that case, verisign was not billing for the domain. This might (a bit cynically) provide a commercial motivation for the actions of verisign.
It's worth noting that this is not at all a weird or shady practice, multi-level domains are the very ethos of the domain system, it's built for that, I'm not saying any domain is obligated to do that on the basis that it can, but it's not some esoteric illegal activity, it's normal.
Still, I'm not sure there's any easy technical fix for the .name debacle.
It's safe to ignore altogether, but it can come in handy as a starting domain block/allowlist.
>Still, I'm not sure there's any easy technical fix for the .name debacle.
I think that it's gonna be ok, the owner of the 2ld is still the owner, so they are free to allow the 3ld domain owners to continue "owning" their domains and updating them on the authoritative 2ld DNS. It's just that verisign is no longer sanctifying it by allow vendors of other 2ld to sell 3ld with the 2ld together.
This might explain the whole situation, many of us are interpreting that the domains are deleted, but in reality, they may more likely be prohibited from being represented as official .name domains in registrars .
i.e. I own john.doe.name, you own george.joe.name. Once this change goes through, only "doe.name" can be owned, so who gets it?
* .name is open for everybody
* a company called "Global Name Registry" scooped up a BUNCH of common last names, including fraser.name
* Global Name Registry then sold access to neil.fraser.name for far cheaper than the fraser.name domain would cost on its own; someone else could also buy john.fraser.name or jane.fraser.name, so the single fraser.name domain that they owned could have dozens of customers associated to it. They worked with ICANN to allow each domain to have its own registered owner.
* The article in the OP bought neil.fraser.name and has used it for years
* Verisign bought Global Name Registry; later they realized, hey, we're sorta not making a lot of money on this idea, and we're spending a lot of time/resources maintaining these domains "for cheap" and chasing renewals, and not scooping up more customers. Let's just stop it and stop paying for fraser.name and the potentially hundreds of other domains we own.
* Neil Fraser, not the only Fraser in the world, is upset because he might lose the domain he's had forever
So one CAN buy the mwai.name domain, as you have, and continue using vpn.mwai.name just fine. It's just you can't "officially" start selling out these subdomains as a separate registrar entry.
I guess in practice it doesn't make much of a difference for me anymore, I registered mwai.name 20 years after they began allowing second-level registrations and more than 15 years after GNR was sold to Verisign. So presumably GNR's concept was long-abandoned by the time I made my registration (which was, to be truthful, mostly based on mwai.name being the cheapest domain with the initialism). I was more curious about the implications of having held a second-level domain, whether it could have caused trouble for me or for a different person who held a tertiary domain. But also my registrar at least doesn't seem to allow tertiary domain registration for .name.
Any any case, nothing in OP or any of its referenced sources suggest Verisign is giving up .name. rather they will stop accepting and serving tertiary registrations, so if Neil wants to keep his domain he or another beneficent Fraser will need to register the fraser.name domain and register the subdomains for neil, joe, jill, or whichever other fraser currently owns a tertiary domain. The same would be the case for anyone else who still held a tertiary domain. Perhaps Verisign or the registrars who work with them might be able to migrate the registrations of anyone with these domains, particularly in what I suspect are most cases where there is a single tertiary registration under a secondary domain. Perhaps offer fraser.name to Neil and he can add his own subdomains.
I was intending to replying to a different comment on the above thread, sorry if this made my previous reply a bit incoherent.
This is an ostensibly uncharacteristic move for verisign, but the customers that bought these 2ld did so from a non-verisign vendor, it is only after verisign bought the 2ld holder that they became the holders and are now proceeding to extinguishing them after embracing and extending.
Might be an anti-trust case. Like textbook clear-cut case. IANAL, this is not legal advice.