6 ms·

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 f

by p4bl0 13d ago

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.

pbronez 13d ago
I thought that was the point of .me, but apparently that’s actually the Montenegro national TLD despite widespread use for personal sites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.me
- devrand 13d ago
  All two letter TLDs are reserved for ccTLDs.
  - syncsynchalt 13d ago
    And some, like Anguilla or Tuvalu, hit the lottery and get a nice income from renting theirs out for general use.
simiones 13d ago
> 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).
- vidarh 13d ago
  > 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 firstname@lastname.name as an e-mail address.
  - simiones 10d ago
    > 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 `??@firstname.lastname.name` 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".

by p4bl0 13d ago

pbronez 13d ago

I thought that was the point of .me, but apparently that’s actually the Montenegro national TLD despite widespread use for personal sites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.me

devrand 13d ago
All two letter TLDs are reserved for ccTLDs.
- syncsynchalt 13d ago
  And some, like Anguilla or Tuvalu, hit the lottery and get a nice income from renting theirs out for general use.

simiones 13d ago

> 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).

vidarh 13d ago
> 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 firstname@lastname.name as an e-mail address.
- simiones 10d ago
  > 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 `??@firstname.lastname.name` 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".