Yet another Hacker News

51 points nikanj 2 days ago 27 comments

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.

nikanj 2 days ago | parent

In case you haven't heard about this, see https://domainnamewire.com/2026/09/03/third-level-dot-name/

jolmg 2 hours ago | parent

> His registrar informed him that his registration will be terminated in February (even though it’s paid through 2040).

Wonder if registrars will refund to people's cards.

toomuchtodo 2 days ago | parent

Consider editing title to be "Tell HN:" Thank you for the PSA!

nikanj 2 days ago | parent

Good point, changed. Thanks!

mindaslab 2 days ago | parent

Why re they doing this? Looks stupid to me.

nikanj 2 days ago | parent

By kicking old nerds off legacy.domain.name, they can relist domain.name on the open market and make an absolute killing.

kiesel 2 hours ago | parent

Worth noting, this doesn't affect domain.name, thus 2nd level domains. I was actually unaware you could directly register a 3rd level domain... Got my .name in the sunrise phase of .name, though it later rendered obsolete by name change on marriage (but still got it).

mnd999 2 hours ago | parent

I have a second level and I’m in the process too. This kind of shitty behaviour warrants bankruptcy.

pelagicAustral 1 hour ago | parent

Biggest rug pull in the history of dns

InsidiousWombat 53 minutes ago | parent

Nah, turning existing domains premium (sometimes 10x or higher cost) under the users is IMO worse, as it can catch people that just have it on auto-renew unaware.

moron4hire 1 hour ago | parent

Jesus Christ. In 25 years of working on the Web, this is the first time I'm hearing of "third level domains". WTF? Where and when did this come from?

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.

edent 1 hour ago | parent

You've never seen example.co.uk? Many countries use them because the top level domains for gov, edu, etc are restricted to one country.

dspillett 1 hour ago | parent

Those are not quite the same though, being something specific and short so essentially behave like a tld in their own right. For a long time you couldn't buy a <something>.uk, it had to be .co.uk or similar, so those _were_ the tld.

The way .name worked you could directly register <name1>.<name2>.name instead if getting <name2>.name and setting up <name1> as a subdomain. It meant john.smith.name and dave.smith.name could be completely separate registrations. You can't generally register <name1>.<name2>.tld like that.

moron4hire 44 minutes ago | parent

This is it. There's a blurry line wherever something should be the registrar's prerogative. The more on the "personal" or "local" scale, the less it should be in control of the registrar.

Though, from a certain academic perspective, I can maybe see some idiot making an ignorantly in-good-faith argument for something like personal names needing to be controlled at the registrar level. Never mind that all of the registrars are evil or that most people share a name with someone else in the world. It ironically goes hand-in-hand with their evilness that they should have the power to deny one party the use of their own name due to the incidental, unrelated, but preemptive use of that name by another party.

Said as the top search result for my firstname-lastname amongst at least 7 such people that I'm aware of, one of which I know is also a software developer. I only continue to preemptively register accounts under my one and only true name to avoid receiving their false and deceitful spam when they forget their email domain is Yahoo, not Gmail...

I know, you might be thinking he's are doing it on purpose to punish me for being more popular. I could see that if the email I was getting was porn or scams or whatever. It's not. It's mortgage paperwork. It's personalized cake decorations. It's hotel reservations. This dude is the worst at maintaining his data I've never met.

Symbiote 1 hour ago | parent

There's two on the second page of active HN discussions, telegraph.co.uk and independent.co.uk.

Should we mention fourth-level domains, like ci.east-palo-alto.ca.us or stanborough.herts.sch.uk?

TZubiri 1 hour ago | parent

there’s nothing special about any level of domains, it was always a hierarchical protocol

jeroenhd 54 minutes ago | parent

The difference is that .name allowed you to buy steven.smith.name and someone else could buy john.smith.name. The shared hierarchy between those names is the .name domain, .smith.name doesn't really exist.

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!

singpolyma3 7 minutes ago | parent

They wouldn't need to "do that" that's how it already works. They're actively undoing that

jeroenhd 1 hour ago | parent

.name has been doing this for 25 years so I guess you must've missed them right when you got started!

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.

victorbjorklund 1 hour ago | parent

Unrelated. What happened with .io? Didn’t they say they would disappear or did that change?

Symbiote 1 hour ago | parent

The proposed treaty between Britain and Mauritius was conditional on the approval of the USA (due to the UK/US air base), and that approval wasn't given.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Indian_Ocean_Territory

swiftcoder 22 minutes ago | parent

That approval would likely have been considered a mere formality under other administrations, but unfortunately intersected with the current administration's obsession over territory...

wodenokoto 1 hour ago | parent

Wait, so if you own Johnson.name you and use John.Johnson.name as your web address, that will stop working?

OtomotO 1 hour ago | parent

I don't think so. If you own it, you can have any subdomain.

At least I hope this is the case. I have a memorial page for my uncle under hisfirstname.ourlastname.name

OJFord 50 minutes ago | parent

No this is people who have registered john.johnson.name, but johnson.name remains Verisign's (and e.g. unrelated Alice has also registered alice.johnson.name)

OtomotO 20 minutes ago | parent

tbh, as an owner of a .name (tld) I don't understand how this worked in the real world.

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!