There is a residual cleanup problem with registrants who were with Tucows/OpenSRS and had their domains come up for renewal since late August. Tucows would not renew them and it was hard for registrants to find another registrar that would. Doytchin spent quite a bit of time looking and I think the only one he found that would accept a transfer of both the third level domain and the email forwarding service was 007names.
This meant a lot of domains expired. Worse, some entered the Redemption Period, where they can no longer be transferred to another registrar - the only option is to redeem through Tucows and they will not do it.
The practical solution seems to be:
1. If the domain is expired but still within the grace period, transfer it now;
2. It it entered the redemption period, wait until it becomes available again (up to 35 days) and re-register through a registrar like 007names to recover it.
Quite unsatisfactory on the part of Tucows (the biggest registrar of third level domains by far), to let all this happen and they really should offer subsidised redemption for affected domains in the redemption grace period.
The requests for reconsideration are now part of the permanent public record - with the arguments now there for anybody to pick up in future, it is quite unlikely that there will be a repeat of this in any GTLD registry. The dodgy non-ICANN subdomains (like eu.org) are a different issue, but if you use them you take your risk.
They are grandfathering existing third levels and existing email forwarding services. The new RSEPs will just discontinue offering the services as new services, with Verisign saying they will take responsibility for ensuring that there will always be at least one registrar who supports both.
The public suffix list is a stupid hack that should be replaced by formal protocols allowing boundaries to be defined by either DNS entries, or a file on the web server.
I personally think the public suffix list should be replaced by zero sharing even amongst subdomains, and if you want to talk between x.y.example.org and example.org you can use CORS just like any other cross-domain request.
Do it for every new TLD. Do it for every new domain in an existing TLD. Add an opt-in for security, then start pushing for the security measure, then get browsers to start carrot-and-stick enforcing it...
22,000 third levels total, spread across about 12,000 second levels, about 10,000 of which have only one third level. Of the approximately 2,000 with multiples, many have all of the third level registrants being apparently close relatives.
That leaves quite a few with lots of unrelated registrants, mostly in Japan (tanaka and suzuki being the biggest).
Most japanese third-level .name domains were registered with YahooDomains.co.jp which ceased its activities in 2025. Almost none of them have been transferred elsewhere so there's no response to DNS requests for them…
I'm reasonably certain my wife won't poison the milk in the fridge and she's reasonably certain I'm not going to read her emails.
This is only a safe bet until it isn't. If she starts asking about your life insurance and hiding her phone from your view, you will know it isn't a safe bet anymore.
There is a problem with registrars dealing with the third level domain because it requires a different UI at the very least and many of them just decline to do it. It has become increasingly hard over the years to find one that will do it.
Verisign could create a work-around by defining a format at the second level - such as ml--2-4-johnsmith.name in which the first number is the number of levels, then there are n - 1 numbers to identify the number of characters at this level, so in this case it would map to john.smith.name at the registry level. There are only about 5 or 6 existing second level domains that are too long for that to work and they could be remapped as, say, ml--id-1 through to ml--id-6.
Since the double dash at that position is reserved for registries (the registry should reject a registration with double dash at that position outside of its own defined uses and xn-- for punycode domains) , this would allow Verisign to facilitate those domains being managed (or even created afresh as long as they are not too long) as if they were second level domains while continuing the third level domain service, avoiding the registrar implementation problem.
They won't do it though because Verisign has never been known for the customer-focus or corporate responsibility.
As a lawyer myself who also has rather a bit of a technology background, I do not see how any lawyer could possibly consider that such an argument holds water.
This meant a lot of domains expired. Worse, some entered the Redemption Period, where they can no longer be transferred to another registrar - the only option is to redeem through Tucows and they will not do it.
The practical solution seems to be: 1. If the domain is expired but still within the grace period, transfer it now; 2. It it entered the redemption period, wait until it becomes available again (up to 35 days) and re-register through a registrar like 007names to recover it.
Quite unsatisfactory on the part of Tucows (the biggest registrar of third level domains by far), to let all this happen and they really should offer subsidised redemption for affected domains in the redemption grace period.
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