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 is 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 relating to the domain name could be made under California law. Previously, cases disagreed as to whether it could be recognized. The Court found that it could be.
Where?
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 :)
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...
(Edit: I'm not actually mad, but it was annoying to have to move accounts from my first@last.name email to another one)
And to show off another fun character, for languages like Spanish that start a question with an inverted question mark, there's also ⸘, the inverted interrobang.
Though I find the name some people call it, gnaborretni (interrobang backwards), much sillier.
And yes, I love the interrobang! Ever since I mapped scroll lock to "compose" on my keyboard, I've had fun typing all sorts of characters :)
[0] https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/203c/index.htm
[1] https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2047/index.htm
203C;DOUBLE EXCLAMATION MARK;Po;0;ON;<compat> 0021 0021;;;;N;;;;;
203D;INTERROBANG;Po;0;ON;;;;;N;;;;;
2047;DOUBLE QUESTION MARK;Po;0;ON;<compat> 003F 003F;;;;N;;;;;
2048;QUESTION EXCLAMATION MARK;Po;0;ON;<compat> 003F 0021;;;;N;;;;;
2049;EXCLAMATION QUESTION MARK;Po;0;ON;<compat> 0021 003F;;;;N;;;;;I first heard of it back when Usenet was still the hotness.
Apparently it's been around for close to a century, so if it hasn't caught on widely by now, you're probably right.
This is the first (and probably last) time that I will ever see the words "Usenet" and "hotness" in the same sentence.
Well done, sir.
On a typewriter, you could type one punctuation mark, backspace, and then type another.
Even once computers added the interrobang to Unicode (or older systems), you either need to type in a numeric code, use a secret bucky bit, or select it from a graphical UI, none of which is worth it for more than the odd weirdo with a whimsical streak.
Unfortunately I am stuck in commitments on a few of these domains and just had to eat the cost increases, the rest I moved to .com/.net.
.consulting was the worst offender.
Yes, I view most 'new' TLDs as scams. They lure you in with a low price, a rather pricey renewal and then price hike after price hike down the line. They also charge a premium for most dictionary words right from the start.
For all the ones holding exclusive second level domains, just give them the second level domain. For all the ones holding shared second levels, offer a buyout and/or allow parties to negotiate with each other on a shared ownership structure of the second level.
However, I also suspect that for most of the third level domains, they're on a second level domain with multiple registrants. And several of those shared second level domains will have a lot of registrants. If the registrants are in different jurisdictions, it becomes a pretty nasty process to develop international consensus, vs just keeping the status quo going (which IMHO, can't be that hard).
Still, it makes sense to have a process to normalize the single registrant second level domains, because less work.
That leaves quite a few with lots of unrelated registrants, mostly in Japan (tanaka and suzuki being the biggest).
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.
.name was something where you could register a two part domain, picking both the third and second level, to represent your first and last name.
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.
Closed. Wont fix.
.co.uk wouldn't have the same problem because everyone knows that combo is a TLD in and of itself. with a seemingly infinite possible combinations of blah.name that could be a TLD itself, or, might just be a subdomain of .name, it gets really weird
Verisign claimed approximately 22,000 third level domains [1] in July 2026. I don't see an estimate of the number of shared second level domains, but it's finite. The current public suffix list includes 10414 names [2]; so at maximum, the list would approximately triple in size --- not ideal, but feasible.
[1] https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/consensus-policies/fessen...
[2] including some with wildcards, re: your other post