Why would they want to drop the possibility of selling some as premium domains? If they have their shells setup right they will probably be able to get a premium from some 3rd level domain owners wrongly afraid someone else is interested.
The main problem with the Internet today is that we didn't destroy ICANN when they started this TLD sell off crap. A replacement institution may have at least told Verisign a TLD they can't run transfer to someone who can meet its promises can only be destroyed.
The .name predates the TLD well-off crap. The first huge bulk of new TLDs happened in 2014, .name dates back from 2001, just like .info or .coop.
Also, .name filled an actual need for general non ccTLD: companies had .com, organizations had .org, Internet related stuff had .net, there was .gov, .edu, .mil, and ccTLDs, but nothing made for individuals. It filled this use case, it actually made sense.
> Also, .name filled an actual need for general non ccTLD
That's a silly idea. While there are laws that ensure to a decent extent that there is a single company called "Google", so that it's relatively unambiguous who `google.com` should refer to, there is no uniqueness whatsoever to personal names. There are likely hundreds of thousands of people called "John Smith", so the FQDN `john.smith.name.` would not really tell you anything.
This is without even going into the fact that "first-name.last-name" is culturally specific (though, to be fair, a large proportion of cultures in the world use this format).
> While there are laws that ensure to a decent extent that there is a single company called "Google"
There aren't laws to ensure that. Within specific jurisdictions, sure, but not globally.
A lot of companies also don't trade under their full name. Apple, famously, wasn't founded as Apple but as Apple Computer, and was only able to rename after achieving a deal with Apple Records.
The lack of more namespaces also led to things like nissan.com being owned by Uzi Nissan (and now his family, I assume) rather than the car company.
While you're right that there are many duplicates, one extra TLD still broadened the namespace a lot, and the most important part of the idea was that by giving people less of a reason to register <lastname>.com or <lastname>.cctld, we'd give far more people the option to get <firstname>@<lastname>.name as an email address.
(The cultural aspect is irrelevant - it was not enforcing a specific order. If people wanted to register lastname.firstname.com, nothing would stop that)
By the time we applied for .name we actually had experience running a webmail service where people shared ~60,000 domain names, and had ~2 million accounts on that, and we'd done extensive modelling before acquiring those, and as a result at the time we probably had better data than anyone on the distribution of names worldwide.
What we seriously overestimated (every applicant overestimated how popular the new TLDs would be, but the generic ones, generally did better) was how many people were in the intersection of people who'd figure out how to buy a domain name and people who wanted[email protected] as an e-mail address.
> There aren't laws to ensure that. Within specific jurisdictions, sure, but not globally.
Many trademarks are indeed more or less global.
> A lot of companies also don't trade under their full name. Apple, famously, wasn't founded as Apple but as Apple Computer, and was only able to rename after achieving a deal with Apple Records.
That's irrelevant - Apple Computers owns the Apple trademark (for certain industries).
> The lack of more namespaces also led to things like nissan.com being owned by Uzi Nissan (and now his family, I assume) rather than the car company.
It's not perfect and not guaranteed to be unique, yes. But people's names have many orders of magnitude more collisions.
> <firstname>@<lastname>.name as an email address.
No, you'd at best get `[email protected]` as your email address. Which, again, is irrelevant, as it's impossible to say which of the many thousands of Firstname Lastname people this might belong to.
> (The cultural aspect is irrelevant - it was not enforcing a specific order. If people wanted to register lastname.firstname.com, nothing would stop that)
I wasn't referring to a specific order, but to the cultural idea that people have 1 firstname and 1 lastname. In Spain, for example, people typically have 1 first name and 2 last names - but you couldn't get `a.b.c.name` as an address. Having a first name, a middle name, and a last name is also very common.
There are also cultures where people simply have one name, not first + last. For example, a person's full legal name in Tibet might just be "Woeser".
And the vast majority are not, so this has no relevance.
> That's irrelevant - Apple Computers owns the Apple trademark (for certain industries).
And yet you yourself concede in this very same statement that it is not absolute. Even with one of the most famous examples from one of the largest companies in the world.
> It's not perfect and not guaranteed to be unique, yes. But people's names have many orders of magnitude more collisions.
For most people our data was very clear that for most names the number of collisions are in fact relatively low, further significantly mitigated by the combination of nicknames and ability to use middle names. Very few last names are highly frequent, and very few of those with common last names have an intersection of a very common first name and a very common last name. The vast majority of people fall in a long tail of last names held by a few thousand people, and first names held by a few thousand people.
For the webmail service that preceded .name, the vast majority of the two million accounts registered were for names for people who would have no way of getting their firstnam@lastname.<tld> addresses without it because of colissions. That some of those would not be able to get one of our addresses either because their specific combination was particularly common does not alter the objective fact that we massively broadened the availability.
> No, you'd at best get `[email protected]` as your email address. Which, again, is irrelevant, as it's impossible to say which of the many thousands of Firstname Lastname people this might belong to.
No, that was categorically not how it worked. I personally designed the system to handle this. We provided [email protected] e-mail forwarding to an address of the registrants choice, and provided a reference platform for registrars to support that, that I also designed, and managed the implementation of.
Given that you haven't even bothered to understand what it provided before criticising it, it's hard to assign much value to your arguments.
> I wasn't referring to a specific order, but to the cultural idea that people have 1 firstname and 1 lastname. In Spain, for example, people typically have 1 first name and 2 last names - but you couldn't get `a.b.c.name` as an address. Having a first name, a middle name, and a last name is also very common.
Spanish people are perfectly capable of using their firstname and their fathers first lastname when limited to one last name. They are also capable of using 2, 3, or 4 last names depending on context and preference. For any that wanted to use more, they had more flexibility, because they could similarly register b.c.name, and use a.b.c.name, or register any combination preferred for the last two labels and set up the rest themselves.
Same if you insisted on using your middle name. We only provided the increased ability to share among those with overlapping two last labels, but that did not change the ability to use regular DNS features.
> There are also cultures where people simply have one name, not first + last. For example, a person's full legal name in Tibet might just be "Woeser".
While you're right that exists, firstly it's a miniscule proportion of people. We collected stats on that two. If you fell in that group, your options were either to use another TLD, or use another indicator. In Europe as well, in cultures that used to use only one legal name, people would still regularly use distinguishing attributes, such as place names or occupations. In fact, both of those are the source of most legal lastnames in Europe today. E.g. my last name is the name of the farm my great great grandfather came from, and names like Baker and Smith are occupations.
There is no need to be able to be a perfect match to a given format for everyone to still meaningfully and significantly enlargen the available namespace.
This is a long way of saying you're being intentionally obtuse.
We overestimated the demand for paying for "vanity" addresses, but ability to register peoples names was not a problem - something we categorically proved with the webmail service that preceded it.
Because it's not worth it financially. After icann is the tld registrar, and after that above. So, if anyone is destroying it, it's not the registrar, it's the tld.
>> In light of the fact that Verisign and ICANN are in the process
of discussing the upcoming renewal of the .NAME Registry Agreement, ICANN is issuing Verisign this letter in lieu of a contract amendment to the expiring
It's clear to me ICANN can say no agreement change or total destruction. You are correct that they could do something else and show every indication that they would never do the right thing and that is why they should be destroyed.
I've rarely heard of that going to the letter. Many city schools are way too lax and let some helicopter parents reinforce the anxiousness of their children until the imagined requirements become disruptive within school grounds. These highly trained parents can prolong the insecurity any child would feel on the first day until their children really start to have a problem and abnormal social bonds.
Your arguments might align with his fence but they are not his fence which is about determining an intentional earlier action.
The random placement has no explanation for why it will outperform any other truly random placement in a future storm. Path dependent behavior of agents after placement is a better argument but that assumes you don't want to upset other agents. Disruption is taking benefit in removing things that are a higher positive to the whole than to yourself.
I'm not a fan of housing as an investment but ignoring that it is an investment is a social form similar to tax evasion.
This author owns there own home and even if they have an infinite length mortgage they are likely to end up with new principal to do a reverse mortgage on and similar investment return to someone buying on margin with no interest. It's basically just moving the elitist pension system from the job to the housing.
The author ending up at an inheritance of no value is not all that different than someone leaving only the house if houses weren't an investment and they had a pension to death. The house acted as a vehicle to give them all the investment structure they lacked. The problem with this situation is the people who are excluded from home ownership and paying rents.
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