Friday, September 4, 2026

.name Termination

Neil Fraser (via Hacker News):

Nearly twenty-five years ago I registered neil.fraser.name to provide a stable presence on the Internet. It has been the home of this website, my email address, and a server for APIs.

[…]

On 15 April 2026 Verisign proposed the destruction of the entire 3rd level of the ‘.name’ hierarchy in order to simplify their administration. Astonishingly, on 28 July 2026 ICANN approved this action.

[…]

One of my original reasons for choosing ‘.name’ was that it was run by Global Name Registry -- more specifically, it was not run by Verisign. I had history with Verisign and did not trust them. Unfortunately, Verisign acquired Global Name Registry a few years later.

He’s going to lose his site and e-mail address, and someone else could potentially register the domain and hijack his accounts.

Previously:

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Really tough situation... who actually "owns" this? Yeah, it can easily get into everything from your music to games to software you purchased 10 years ago - and have the physical CD-ROM to prove it).

My personal history. My first email address was owned by an entity (that supplied both cable TV and was an ISP) called Adelphia. I don't know, maybe 20 years ago they went beakrupt. Purchased by Time-Warner Cable (or TWC or to at least one person I know Satan). Now I was informed my "adelphia.net" emails I created last century would need to be changed to "roadrunner.com" (not to be confused with "rr.com". Okay. Now, 20+ years after that, I dropped Spectrum. Who? Oh yeah, forgot to mention, about 10 years ago they bought TWC. They have "spectrum.net" but it never clicked with me. I pay my monthly bills with "roadrunner.com" so why change?

Well, it took Spectrum 11 months (and thanks1) but they shut off my "roadrunner.com" emails. That I had for 20+ years. The thanks is because - after setting up things with what I *hope* is my last change in personal emails, it took a few months to verify that every single bill I pay (and most require an email as either a login or required profile identity entry) was changed.

Again, tough situation. I "believe" I also "own" one domain name (using ".com" so it may be safer) but nobody can - or should - guarantee that it's safe from anything.


Another vote for adding a grace period for spell-checking:

"...they went beakrupt..." should be bankrupt. Maybe I just invented a word!

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