.name termination or why DNS sucks

Pet stumbled across this article on lobsters and given that it's about termination, pet copy-pasted it down here.

Everything is beautiful in it. Pet could not resist the temptation to scratch a few comments between lines.

.name Termination

3 September 2026

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. It predates YouTube, Facebook, and smart phones. Minutes after my daughter was born, I also registered beverly.fraser.name.

In other words, their namesakes were deprived of having a .name domain for 25 years.

That's why DNS sucks.

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.

If not suddenly die, registrars may suddenly imagine you're an anti-LGBT fuck or live in a wrong country, or... whatever.

That's why DNS sucks.

I found out about this a few days ago when my registrar emailed me.

Now, it's worth pausing for a moment to discuss what '3rd-level domains' are. Many people will be familiar with shady operators selling domains like *.uk.co. In that case it's some random guy who bought the 'uk' domain from the country of Colombia, then resells third-levels. If that operator disappears, then so do all the domains he sold. As a result, 3rd-level domains have gotten a dubious reputation. However, '.name' is completely different. It was setup exclusively as a 3rd-level operation. One registers xxx.yyy.name from any registrar and there is a full whois record. Exactly like *.ny.us, or *.co.uk.

Well, some Fraser could register fraser.name, and generously provide 3rd level domains to their namesakes. But DNS still sucks, see the first point above.

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. This mistrust was validated by the numerous lies Verisign included in their above proposal to ICANN.

Big deal. Lots of free developers enjoyed github and suddenly became slaves clients of microsoft. Wipe your nose, you're not alone.

So what does this mean? First, this website vanishes in February. Despite the fact that it's registered and paid for until 2040. Second, my email address also disappears. Third, all the IoT devices that use services on this domain become bricks. Basically, I disappear from the Internet.

A chance for a namesake to appear. It's karma.

But it gets much worse. Once the 3rd-level domains are terminated, it is assumed that the now vacant 2nd-level domains will become available for registration. Should someone (other than me) scoop up fraser.name they would be able to recreate and control neil.fraser.name.

Exactly. Not all Frasers are good persons. Not only Frasers, strictly speaking. Registrars don't give a fuck who registers domains. All you need is $5.

That's why DNS sucks.

They'd be able to hijack hundreds of accounts that are linked to that address.

Yeah! What an opportunity!

DNS sucks, sucks, and sucks!

They could commit code with my authentication. They could seize control of IoT devices.

Using public DNS for IoT is really, really stupid idea. However, he could bring up its own private DNS server with neil.fraser.name zone for backward compatibility.

Basically, IoT hype gave corporations a chance to get in human's homes. But that's another story.

There is no way to enumerate all accounts (online and offline) which have been opened using this email address over the past quarter century.

I'm just one of 22,000 people who will lose their domains. This is going to be fun. Time to lawyer up...

What pet can add to this? Well, humans did not come up with a better system. Neither did pet before it became a pet.

We all fucked up.