4 ms·

Maybe they want to avoid the ambiguity between john.doe.name versus john-doe.name, and I assume they prefer the latter scheme because it probably sells better.

• xp84 1mo ago
  Even that doesn't pass basic scrutiny. The same ambiguity can and always will exist with tim-apple.com and tim.apple.com - there's nothing here that needs fixing.
  • dpoloncsak 1mo ago
    I can say, as a SysAdmin, I have been taught and tell my users to check the domain to verify a website is real. It's a strange edgecase that the owner of John.Doe.com does not need to own Doe.com In every other case that I know about, to own the Joe subdomain of Doe.com, you would need to own Doe.com edit: I guess I've gotten so used to the government 3LDs I just don't even see them anymore, or just see something like .co.uk or .edu.us as a TLD by itself, but yeah those exist too. Still the exception to the rule
    • marysol5 1mo ago
      People still fall for paypal.com.4385ht43987th34098rh34279h3.legitorg.ru
    • dbt00 1mo ago
      That is definitely not true. There are literally thousands if not tens of thousands of well known domains that do this. .co.uk is a very common example.
      • desas 1mo ago
        I think the problem is that .co.uk, .gov.uk and so on are very well known in the UK. The .name subdomain rules are not very well known anywhere.
        • necovek 1mo ago
          How familiar are you with Serbian co.rs, org.rs, in.rs (individuals) and top-level .rs too? Will you confuse it with iz.rs giving free subdomains to individuals too ("iz" means from in Serbian)? How about all the other 200+ country TLDs and rules for non-country TLDs?
      • davkan 1mo ago
        I can’t think of any prominent ones outside of country code domains.
        • bombcar 1mo ago
          You can almost guess someone's age from that alone - they're more rare, but long domain names still appear that encode a city and a state, and you could just "grab" the first part when signing up.
          • davkan 1mo ago
            Outside of the context of ccTLDs and city.state.gov etc, I struggle to think of examples 3LD+ domains where they are owned and operated by completely different concerns than the parent. If at some point you could just register your own mysite.state.gov domains willy nilly that's probably before my initial time online around 2000. Another poster raised the point of hosting services which is valid. But at present outside of that example and the above I really can't think of an example where you have a link to entity.com and you have any significant cause to verify the identity beyond the 2LD.
            • saimiam 1mo ago
              All Indian banks use bankname.bank.in as their domain. I’m not sure who owns bank.in but this is a common suffix which is different from the .co.uk pattern.
              • marysol5 1mo ago
                IDRBT Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology
            • bombcar 1mo ago
              Many services today support vanity domains - Google even has special support for it: https://publicsuffix.org/list/public_suffix_list.dat https://publicsuffix.org/list/public_suffix_list.dat
      • ndiddy 1mo ago
        .name is still a weird edge case because of the naming rules. Whether or not all subdomains under doe.name belong to the same person depends solely on whether the first person registered "doe.name" (in which case they do) or "john.doe.name" (in which case they don't, and "doe.name" is excluded from purchase as a standalone domain).
        • deleted 1mo ago
          [deleted]
      • dpoloncsak 1mo ago
        The fact that multiple organizations need to keep a public list of known 3LDs proves it's the edge case, does it not? "Here's a list of things that look like subdomains for you to treat as 3LDs instead of subdomains" sounds exactly like the solution to an edge case to me.
      • deleted 1mo ago
        [deleted]
      • esseph 1mo ago
        This seems largely country dependent with some exceptions. In the US, once upon a time, elementary/middle/highschools might be attached to something like schoolname.district.state.gov. But now, even my local area school now has a .com. It seems that older hierarchy style is falling out of fashion for smaller/shorter domains across public services, schools, government agencies, etc. Now here it seems to be either a .com, .gov, .org, or a totally different and newer tld. Even .net has fallen out of fashion.
        • CoffeeOnWrite 1mo ago
          The writing was on the wall when Pennsylvania switched their license plates from www.state.pa.us to visitpa.com
        • pests 1mo ago
          Good article on this by a fellow hner https://computer.rip/2025-11-11-dot-us.html https://computer.rip/2025-11-11-dot-us.html
    • gapan 1mo ago
      There are still exceptions to this like .co.uk and many others.
    • veltas 1mo ago
      Yet that is a problem the owner of such a domain has freely entered into by buying that domain, it's their right to keep it despite this apparent problem, if they wish.
      • dpoloncsak 1mo ago
        Understood, and .name isn't being used enough in business to worry about 'the effect it will have on my users'. Just pointing out that it doesn't work like the 'norm' (although I guess it's not quite as unique as I thought, either)
        • veltas 1mo ago
          That's actually the point of the .name TLD is that it's not for businesses, it's for individuals. This whole situation demonstrates ICANN is more for businesses than individuals. It should just be there for everyone and every organisation that's trying to use URI's, shame that it's not worked out that way. This is exactly what the big tech companies want, they might as well hand ICANN over to Facebook or Google, they wouldn't do much worse.
    • amiga386 1mo ago
      Hello sysadmin. Good luck navigating the internet. What you should know, and what your browser does know and automatically applies cookie policy and colouring your URL bar, is the Public Suffix List: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Suffix_List https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Suffix_List It will let you know that, for example, one does not need to own .co.uk to own the subdomain foo.co.uk.
      • dpoloncsak 1mo ago
        I appreciate this, and yeah the government/education ones slipped my mind, but I stand by the fact that the reason a list needs to be kept in the first place is because this is the edge case and not the norm.
        • iminatx 1mo ago
          Supposing it were not an edge case and were typical, how exactly would you implement the same thing without keeping a list?
      • strenholme 1mo ago
        The .name mess is not in the public suffix list. https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/issues/2306 https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/issues/2306 for more discussion.
      • fc417fc802 1mo ago
        The public suffix list is a half assed bandaid over a fundamentally broken system.
    • Glide 1mo ago
      Looking at the threads below, very few people are discussing technical things in dns terms like zone or nameserver. Yeah. The way how most things on the internet prove ownership make the assumption that the 3ld is owned by the 2ld. Extend it once out for country specific ones and you cover most cases that people have to work with. Then when you consider DNS is fundamental infrastructure and people build secure things on top of it, (ahem DNS challenges for certs), it's remarkable that anyone would want or desire edge cases.
      • strken 1mo ago
        This doesn't seem like a problem if you exclusively support 3LDs and don't let anyone register 2LDs.
      • marysol5 1mo ago
        Problem is, all these systems we still use were never designed to be like this. Hell DNS used to be one woman in an office who updated the zone if you e-mailed her.
      • vidarh 1mo ago
        This wasn't really a consideration for anyone back when we applied for .name, and it already wasn't true back then (.us, and .uk were both prominent examples where it didn't hold)
      • gwillen 1mo ago
        There is a list called the Public Suffix List, which is used for most purposes to make determinations about which 2lds do not own/manage the corresponding 3lds. It's maintained by Mozilla as a public service, which isn't exactly where you'd expect to find it. But it's mostly important for web security / "same origin" stuff, so it makes sense. In addition to all the country codes TLDs that do 3rd-level registration, the PSL does also include stuff like github.io. (Maintenance of the list involves manual volunteer labor, so scaling is a real problem...) (And of course the PSL wouldn't work well for the .name situation, where it's sometimes 2 and sometimes 3, and it can change over time. But that's no excuse for this clusterfuck of just suddenly dropping a bunch of domains that are paid up years in advance.)
    • xp84 28d ago
      >It's a strange edgecase that the owner of John.Doe.com does not need to own Doe.com I think you meant to say "the owner of John.Doe.name does not need to own Doe.name" since .com just works under the 'normal' rules you're used to. But it's worth pointing out that under the current system (that Verisign is destroying), no registrant owns (e.g.) fraser.name just as no one (but the registry itself) owns co.uk. So, if someone checks who owns fraser.name they wouldn't have found a scenario, for instance, that fraser.name belongs to, say, Simon Fraser University, with admissions.fraser.name belonging to some phishing site. > I have been taught and tell my users to check the domain to verify a website is real. Anyway, having seen enough eyes glaze over at the most basic tutorials of this sort, I'm afraid you're wasting your time. Given that this edge case is on nobody's radar, I don't think it's what's preventing 80% of Internet users from being able to get a passing score on a basic quiz on the hierarchial DNS. As evidenced by all the government entities that gave up and registered literal ".coms"
  • layer8 1mo ago
    True, they can’t outright prevent the ambiguity, but much fewer people will go to the trouble of establishing such subdomains when the option isn’t directly offered by the registrar. This is my theory because, a priori, 3LDs should be more profitable than 2LDs, because with 3LDs John Doe and Jane Doe don’t have to compete over doe.name, but instead can each separately purchase john.doe.name and jane.doe.name. Apparently, however, that’s not a benefit of 3LDs in practice, which leads me to conclude that john-doe.name and jane-doe.name just sell better.
    • toast0 1mo ago
      > This is my theory because, a priori, 3LDs should be more profitable than 2LDs, 3LDs are less valuable. In a market of many different tlds, why register foo.bar.name when you could get foobar.name or foobar.something_else
      • layer8 1mo ago
        Because your name is John Doe and not JohnDoe.
        • toast0 1mo ago
          Your name is also not John.Doe. Mr. Fraser registered neil.fraser.name in 2002, when 2nd level registration under .name was unavailable; fraser.com had been registered in 1996 and neilfraser.com in 2000; he may have been able to get .org or .net, their registration dates are later, but they may have been registered and there was a gap --- my personal domain shows a creation date of 2003, but I registered it much earlier and abandoned it, but got it back after it was registered and then abandoned by someone else. .name added 2nd level registration in 2004 and it seems to be vastly preferred. .us added 2nd level registration in 2002 and it was vastly preferred to the locality based naming. People don't want to have to educate their contacts about "weird" domains, which includes having an "extra" dot in your hostname.
    • QuantumNomad_ 1mo ago
      Prior to reading the OP blog post, I had never looked into the particular rules that .name has. To me, prior to knowing how it works, I would have assumed that either a) john.doe.name would be a subdomain that someone who was just starting out had gotten for free supported by ads. Similar to having johndoe.freewebs.com back in the day. Not something most people would use for anything professional. or, b) doe.name was registered by one of the people in a family of Doe’s where every Doe is pretty closely related. For example, John of john.doe.name and Jane of jane.doe.name are husband and wife, or third cousins, or what have you. Most of the content, I would assume, is mostly about things that relate to the family. Like maybe one guy is doing a family genealogy project tracing the roots of this little cluster of Doe’s back in time and has made a site covering the findings from his research. And another one probably has some photo albums with pictures of like previous Thanksgivings and other family get togethers. In other words, nothing I would care about unless I was in their family or a very close friend of the family. I would not have guessed that .name 3LDs worked the way that it did if I hadn’t read about it. And on the other hand, if I saw just www.doe.name or johndoe.name, I would not make such assumptions. It would be not much different than seeing www.doe.com or johndoe.com respectively. I would just assume that .com was already taken and therefore they used .name, or that they happened to like the .name TLD because it emphasises that their site has their name as domain name.
  • VonGallifrey 1mo ago
    > The same ambiguity can and always will exist with tim-apple.com and tim.apple.com Similarly, I recently got a scam email that linked to de-apple.com (not a domain owned by APPLE) and also used apple.com-18221.com (also not apple.com). I reported those domains to the registrar, but apparently it is not impersonating enough to take action.
• joemi 1mo ago
  Was it even possible to register just a second level .name domain name? It sounds like it wasn't, so therefore no one would be using john-doe.name and there'd be no ambiguity.
  • WesolyKubeczek 1mo ago
    It was, I have one.
  • anttihaapala 1mo ago
    Yes it has been. I have had a second level .name for 20 years.
  • p4bl0 1mo ago
    Not at the very beginning, but then it became possible.
  • iminatx 1mo ago
    It was initially not possible, then later opened up, though a large collection of known surnames and personal names are reserved and cannot be registered as 2LDs. As far as I know the list of reserved names is unavailable, but you can run a whois query on any one of them to see it is reserved. E.g. check whois baxter.name and you get a response saying, "Not available for second level registration. Third level registrations may be available on this shared name." I have the .name zone file and can confirm that no records for baxter.name appear therein, so it is not reserved only because a 3LD registration has ever taken place, it is reserved proactively just in case someone with that surname might want to register a 3LD under it.
• brlewis 1mo ago
  It's exceedingly charitable of you to try to infer a good reason for what they're proposing. I say "exceedingly" because in their proposal they had the opportunity to present a good reason, and they chose not to use that opportunity.