question What is .NAME gTLD supposed to represent?

[ohp]

nic.name redirects to a Verisign page which says .NAME is for your personal online identity and according to ICANNwiki this TLD has been around since 2000, which makes it much older than the New gTLDs. All these years, I have never come across an actual website using this extension. I checked Whois for dozens of human names, some common, some not so common from different languages, different parts of the world and they all seems to be reserved at the registry level, not even available for a premium price. But if I try a non-name string then it's available for registration. If this is supposed to be for personal names why are they blocking all the names?

 

[HotKey]

It was realized that all other names are hopeless

domain.name

 

[pb]

IIRC it was required to register domains in the format first.last.name, which by design made it useless for families (you couldn't just control your last.name and make subdomains) or e-mail ([email protected]). Obviously people preferred to try and get lastname.com/net/org or even firstlast.com. For this reason it never caught up.

 

[ohp]

IIRC it was required to register domains in the format first.last.name, which by design made it useless for families (you couldn't just control your last.name and make subdomains) or e-mail ([email protected]). Obviously people preferred to try and get lastname.com/net/org or even firstlast.com. For this reason it never caught up.

So how is one supposed to go about registering a first.last.name. I don't see any registrars listing any last.name as supported extensions, only .name. I tried manually typing out this pattern with common surnames with a few different registrars. They either say unsupported extension or just suggest firstlast.name without the dot between first and last.

 

[HotKey]

You can't register subdomains.. those are created by the domain owner.

Say you wanted deltoros.name you can register it and then create your own subdomain like family.deltoros.name if that was your prerogative.

 

[ohp]

You can't register subdomains.. those are created by the domain owner.

I know that. You probably didn't read my original post and @pb's reply. My comment was regarding what @pb said. From what he says it looks like this tld doesn't consider that as subdomains, but rather the actual domain

 

[pb]

It probably changed since launch, I just mentioned what it was like at the beginning, because I think it was the main reason why it didn't take off. That said, it seems that names and surnames (even not so popular ones) are reserved by the registry, so, paired with apparent inability to register third level domains, it's even more useless.

You should have some luck using whois instead of registrar's services, because it provides info about domain status, for example:

smith.name
steve.name
trump.name
Not available for second level registration.
Third level registrations may be available on this shared name.

biden.name
ciaran.name
bogdanoff.name
Not available for registration.
Second level domain name is reserved.

dfsdfsdfsdfsd.name
No match for "DFSDFSDFSDFSD.NAME".

john.smith.name
No match for "JOHN.SMITH.NAME".

domain.name
Not available for second level registration.
Third level registrations may be available on this shared name.

www.domain.name
Registry Domain ID: 134533900_DOMAIN_NAME-VRSN
Domain Name: WWW.DOMAIN.NAME
Registrar: 007Names, Inc.
Registrar IANA ID: 91
Domain Status: ok https://icann.org/epp#ok

TBH it's the only domain I found that was registered :D