2 ms·

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 off

by 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.
- marysol5 1mo ago
  >I would not have guessed that .name 3LDs worked the way that it did if I hadn’t read about it. The situation in the OP is exactly what you just put as A)
  - iminatx 1mo ago
    It's... not. Go to whois.nic.name and search for neil.fraser.name, and you will find whois information for that registration. It is properly paid for and registered with Verisign. I use the same registrar, 007Names, for my own .name 3LD. What process did you use to decide this was not the case?
  - QuantumNomad_ 1mo ago
vidarh 1mo ago
That's what we thought when we applied for .name, especially coupled with mail forwarding at doe.name so jane and john could get jane@doe.name and john@doe.name respectively. In practice the demand was lacklustre. We ran a webmail provider prior to that, with 60k domains or so, and the demand was higher for that, basically. To get a decent return out of it, you'd probably have to package it up with services on top, and our investors made us sell off the webmail service when we got .name... It turned out to be the more profitable of the two services. Doh.

by layer8 1mo ago

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.

marysol5 1mo ago
>I would not have guessed that .name 3LDs worked the way that it did if I hadn’t read about it. The situation in the OP is exactly what you just put as A)
- iminatx 1mo ago
  It's... not. Go to whois.nic.name and search for neil.fraser.name, and you will find whois information for that registration. It is properly paid for and registered with Verisign. I use the same registrar, 007Names, for my own .name 3LD. What process did you use to decide this was not the case?
- QuantumNomad_ 1mo ago

vidarh 1mo ago

That's what we thought when we applied for .name, especially coupled with mail forwarding at doe.name so jane and john could get jane@doe.name and john@doe.name respectively. In practice the demand was lacklustre. We ran a webmail provider prior to that, with 60k domains or so, and the demand was higher for that, basically. To get a decent return out of it, you'd probably have to package it up with services on top, and our investors made us sell off the webmail service when we got .name... It turned out to be the more profitable of the two services. Doh.