.NAME at a Crossroads

An anonymous reader writes "It seems the .NAME registry is at a crossroads. They say that things are going far from well, and so they have started their own registrar that is going to try to market .NAME domains to individuals, unlike all other registrars. If they don't manage, this will be the first gTLD to go bankrupt. I guess that will put a damper on any plans to introduce more new TLDs."

Comments

Die .name, die!

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean I won't get any more .name spam??? Good, let it die! .name was a lame idea anyway.

Re:Die .name, die!

[morgajel]

I agree.
Within 70 miles of my house, I accounted for 4 people besides myself that had the same name as me. Two even had the same middle initial.(This was the first thing I did when I was exposed to the internet for the first time way back when).

Now, my name isn't exactly common(Jesse), which makes it even more annoying. Spam for .name is a very LAME idea because names aren't unique, and most people know this.

Selling to individuals is good

[xadhoom]

I've never taken my .name domain just because they don't sell directly to individuals. But now, I have a chanche. I think that's a good idea, but the news should be promoted *alot* .

Re:Selling to individuals is good

[raju1kabir]

But once one person have bought smith.whatever, the remaining 3 million people with Smith as their lastname will be out of luck. Hence .name, where all of them still have a chance at getting their firstname@smith.name

In other words, it's a totally useless service and I can't imagine anyone using it. You can get a proper domain from anyone else and do what you want with it, and do it properly. Why pay for this crippled version where you have to depend on servers run by some unknown entity with unproven email/web server expertise to pass your mail/web traffic along? I wouldn't use this for my personal snapshots-of-friends-weddings site, let alone something connected to my work as an author or artist.

The reason this is doomed to failure is because the only people whose needs are so shallow that they'd accept this arrangement, don't care enough to go to the trouble and spend the money, especially for something they can't really understand.

This enterprise will be belly-up by the year's end. They can go hang out at the bar with the Realnames people.

Does anyone have one?

[krony]

Seriously, does anybody here actually have a .name TLD for their website? More specifically, do you have a .name without the corresponding .net, .com, or .org?

Being Anonymous

[Anonymous Coward]

I like being somewhat anonymous on the internet and having my email address as my name just makes it easier to figure out stuff about me.

They aren't doing it right.

[z_gringo]

Either that or I don't understand. (It works out the same for me in the end).

I went to register my .name, just for kicks, I entered Z for my First name, and Gringo for my last name, and I was provided with the very helpful message:

Your own, impressive .name addresses
z@gringo.name; and
www.z.gringo.name
may be available right now.


Which isn't really what I would want at all, IF I did want a .name. I would want zGringo.name

Their version of "whois" isn't really what I'm used to.. Maybe that's the way it's supposed to work, but then, that also probably what I'm not really interested in a .name.

And, what's up with their response: www.z.gringo.name
may be available right now?? Is it available or not? It was a yes or no question..

argh..

Re:They aren't doing it right.

[anticypher]

the .name service should all be put to death (in a texas department of corrections sense of the word) for their crimes against the internet community.

Really, what they have done is squat on tens of thousands of names, in the hopes of extorting a few services from the masses. They don't offer traditional DNS services, where someone types in a name and the resolver returns the IP address of your name server, they are offering only email and web redirecting services. Nothing else.

I want anticypher.name to point to my name server, but they won't do that. They will give me a heavily spammed anti@cypher.name email forwarding service, or a web redirector with WWW tacked on the front. I know a few people who stupidly signed up for these services, and got a torrent of spam afterwards because they are then marked as gullible, naive idiots, the scammers choice of easy victims.

The whole service should die, the sooner the better.

the AC

Is that surprising?

[t_hunger]

Well, it does not surprise me... having a own domain is cool, I know. But john.doe.name just sounds stupid. And the more common names should be taken allready anyway. How they they handle that? john.smith294.name? Definitly uncool:-(

The registrar claims it is for indivuduals to register their name. I just tried "www.john.smith.name" und ended at www.smith.com, some company website. Doesen't that spoil the purpose?

Finally the website of that registrar claims that john smith "may be available right now." It's not, or it wouldn't redirect me to that company website. Why doesen't the registrar say so? What good is that query field if it cannot even figure out names that even my DNS server knows to be taken?

Now instead of this ridiculous ".name" they should have introduced ".sex" and forced all those sex-companies into that TLD. That could have helped parents to make sure their children do not get exposed to lots of the smut on the net and I'd be happy with just blocking all mails from "*.sex" and have way less spam in my inbox. Of course that wouldn't have worked out completly -- someone is bound to try to offer adult content under other TLDs -- but I'm sure it would have helped.

Now I have to pay attention to TLDS - agggh

[jj_johny]

The fundemental problem that .NAME faces along with the rest of the internet is no garbage collection. These new TLD are pretty useless when you have to make sure that people remember the ext. When it once was default that if you worked for a company, your email was some variation of your name, the at sign and some variation of the company name and then you assumed the .com. If you worked for the gov or an organization, it was pretty clear what its end was. (At least in the US.) But now you have all these bloody domain names that everyones significant email and web address is now 4 or 5 characters longer.

Next they will try a TLD with umlauts and maybe some of the cyrilic letters.

What I'd Like to See

[syr]

The only second generation names I'd like to see would be .kids and .xxx. These two TLDs would solve more problems than they would create, imo. It wouldn't necessarily cause a policing effect on the Internet but it will help narrow potential searches for children and adults to sites that they were actually looking for in the first place.

I'd hate to see what kind of *.xxx domains get picked, though. And for that matter I'd hate to see some of the scary things placed under .kids.

Syr GameTab.com - Game Reviews Database

No surprise?

[Jugalator]

I think this post summarizes the outstanding problems well.

Two points from that post:

- .NAME is a TLD targetted for individuals, but priced for organizations, even if .NAME DNS requests should be far less common than .COM lookups.

- .NAME in your e-mail let spammers easily detect individuals, merely by looking in a phone book and putting an @ between the forename and surname, and finally applying .NAME.

Re:No surprise?

[vidarh]

Considering how spammers can easily autogenerate spam lists for most of the major ISPs by following easy to guess allocation patterns, I don't see why your name would be any easier.

(Disclaimer: I work for Personal Names)

Re:They do (sorta)

[hucke]

Does a person registering within .name get full control of an actual domain - with the ability to create usernames at will, change the nameservers, etc.?

Someone buying "john@smith.name" owns only an email address within a domain he doesn't control. "john.smith.name" is a bit better - if this is actually a domain name that they'll have full control over. If it's just an "A" record in your server, it's not a good deal.

These names have less value than any other domain. I initially registered "hucke.org", years ago, so I could have "matt @ hucke.org"; since then, I've given email addresses within that domain to my mother and brother, at no additional cost. I still pay only $13.50 a year for that domain, regardless of how many addresses or subdomains I create within it. Can john@smith.name do that?

"John Smith" may have a slightly better chance of getting john@smith.name than he would johnsmith.org - but that remains true only as long as .name remains unpopular. If .name domains ever did become popular, you'd suffer from the same unavailability of names as anywhere else.

And john@smith.name still can't add an address for his wife or mother without having to pay an additional fee.

For $19.95 a year, you're delivering a product with *less* value than registrars in other TLDs.

One problem with the .name TLD is...

[krouic]

..that it contains 4 letters instead of 3 or less for the other common TLDs.
I have had my .name email address refused by several on-line purchasing systems, because some dumb programmers decided that an email address that had more than 3 characters after the last dot was invalid. So I have had to get an alternate address to be able to access these sites.

I use .name domain and e-mail...

[Przepla]

...and I will be very unhappy if it disappear.
First of all, I want my own domain and since I am not an ORGanization, not a COMmercial business, not a NETwork backbone .name suits me very well.

I use it since beginning and I receive very little spam (while I post to USENET without even spamblocking my e-mail).

If I would buy .com domain my personal data will be reavealed in Whois database, so I don't care if my name is put in e-mail itself or not.

And finally now I can switch from different ISP without changing subscription addresses, my Bussiness Cards, and sending e-mail to all my friends about new e-mail.

I can agree with one thing, it is not properly advertised. But did you hear about .museum, .coop or .aero domain?

Note: English is not my native language, so please disregard any spelling or grammar mistakes.

Other TLDs? (slightly OT)

[PontifexPrimus]

Quick question:
What happened to the other new TLDs (.aero, .biz, .coop, .museum, .pro, .grumpy and .sneezy)? I don't consciously remember ever seeing one of them - just like I never saw a .name URI. Why introduce all this crap at all if no one uses them?
(Oh, and don't bother checking out www.canna.biz. It's already taken...)

Re:Other TLDs? (slightly OT)

[vidarh]

.biz and .info are doing pretty well (closing in on a million registrations), .name is lagging a bit behind, the rest are still very small, but that's to be expected considering their special nature. The closest comparison would perhaps be .int - how often do you visit .int sites? Yet some very large organizations use .int domains as their primary internet presence.

Remember .com had about a 15 year head start...