Which TLDs allow users to registry arbitrary.arbitrary.tld other than .name?

I read the PDF, and thought I understood, but you're asking a good question. I did some research, and it turns out that when .name launched in 2001 (under Global Name Registry), it used this really weird shared-SLD architecture where the registry retained the second-level domain (e.g., rpdillon.name) and sold independent third-level domains (e.g. bob.rpdillon.name and jane.rpdillon.name) to completely unrelated individuals through ICANN registrars.

I've managed multiple third-level domains for decades, and didn't realize this distinction between registry-managed domains and having the registry delegate third-level domains to the authoritative servers...the latter I'm quite used to, but this change is about the former.

I've never used .name, and while I was initially skeptical, it seems like this is a pretty reasonable move.

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vidarh a day ago | parent [-]

I cofounded Nameplanet, which morphed into GNR, and my name is in the ICANN docs for .name...

Basically, .name came out of us starting out as a webmail provider offering people to pick from ca. 60k domain names covering most common last names, because one of my co-founders and I both had firstname@lastname.tld email addresses.

When ICANN opened up for new TLDs we decided to try to offer the same more broadly.

So it wasn't just the registration, but initially also email forwarding..

None of the first batch of TLDs did as well as projected, and demand for .name was well below what we'd hoped, sadly.

For .name, it was a match of less demand than we thought and people not getting the third level thing, which led to eventually abandoning it as the main offering (after I'd moved on).

We ended up selling to Verisign a few years later.

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slartibardfast0 18 hours ago | parent [-]

thanks for trying, fwiw it made a beautiful domain for java source code back in the day. i hope you can do a long form retrospective on the .name story someday

do you think there's any point in contacting ICANN or Verisign? i'd be sad to lose mine!

it's wild how long some third level domains are still pre-registered for and how little an email forward must cost to run (at the sub-registrar level?)

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vidarh 10 hours ago | parent [-]

It can't hurt to try to contact someone, but I doubt Verisign would listen. Already back then (we contracted them to run the registry backend, over my objections) they were stuffed full of bureaucrats. Maybe ICANN.

I left back in 2003, so can really only talk about the origin. By 2003 we cut staff massively, and after completing a reference registrar platform and laying off most of my team there wasn't really much left for me to do, so I left too...

The guy I originally got the shared domain idea with stuck around with a few of the early developers. Our other co-founders were out at that point.

Most of the fun was the initial mail platform and the registrar platform, both of which leaned heavily on qmail - the latter as a queuing system to decouple everything. Email as a messaging bus works very well...

But the .name process was like pulling teeth. One interesting thing is to look at our original ICANN contract and appendices compared to .biz and .info. We had to supply somewhere around 200 pages extra technical detail for "reasons" that seemed to boil down to us not knowing the right people.

Meanwhile dot-biz got away with maybe 30 pages including things like copy-pasting BNF that had no real relevance.

We ended up working round the clock to provide technical details the others weren't even asked for.

Not sure if someone wanted us to fail, or what the motivation was exactly, but the process was clearly not fair.

	▲	slartibardfast0 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		ah that's wild that top-level owned the MX records and mail relay server infra! thanks very much for sharing. i'm going to send a few old fashioned letters. my registrar said only, we can't give legal advice, ICANN going to ICANN ;)

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cpburns2009 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Don't many ccTLDs do something like that with the ".co.xx" second-level domain? (e.g., ".co.uk")

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zamadatix 21 hours ago | parent [-]

Kinda, it's a slight variation of that from what I can tell. E.g. you can't go and register john.smith.uk because it's arbitrary.fixed.fixed rather than arbitrary.arbitrary.fixed. You can do something like john.smith.co.uk, but only if you have registered smith.co.uk or they delegate to you.

It's an odd concept. I have to say I hadn't really thought of it before reading this.

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Natfan 20 hours ago | parent [-]

i'm 60% sure that anyone can get a .uk domain. police.uk and nhs.uk are the only ones i can think of off the top of my head, but those might be 3TLDs hosts tbf

	▲	zamadatix 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That's arbitrary.fixed, which is something also slightly different. I know this sounds absolutely absurd and your mind must be screaming "so just get arbitrary.fixed and assign yourself whatever.aribtrary.fixed?" at you... but stick with me and I can say with, dare I say, 61% confidence what .name was doing will make you think "uh - ok, yeah... I... guess. People did that?" :). If you own smith.uk then great - you can be john.smith.uk. What about Jim Smith in the UK? Is he supposed to just reach out to John Smith and ask for jim.smith.uk to be delegated to him? What about the thousands of other (anything but John) Smiths, are they just supposed to pester John and ask if he'll delegate the name? What if Jane Doe doesn't want to delegate to other Does? What if Bob Johnson does and then dies - lapsing the renewal? It's all a big mess because one person is assigned arbitrary.tld. That's where arbitrary.arbitrary.tld comes in - arbitrary.tld is managed by the same ones running tld. Now thousands of different people can get their john.smith.tld and jim.smith.tld without having to worry about who controls smith.tld any more. Now sure, there is more than one John Smith... but the chance an individual is able to register their name goes from 1/last to 1/(first*last) and the even when your name is taken it'll take fewer extra characters/nicname variations to find an open one close to it (like jim2.smith.name or jimmy.smith.name). That's what .name was and why tlds like .uk or third level zones under them like .co.uk aren't really the same thing. The 2nd level isn't both arbitrary AND controlled by the tld operator at the same time. The closest you could get in a normal .tld is to start a service which tries to buy up every lastname.tld, but it's not really practical to try to do so and you'll always end up with someone who doesn't want to sell or some name you didn't think to buy.