Pavillon rouge et noir

A few weeks ago, I randomly stumbled upon Neil Fraser's post about third-level .name domain termination. I'm aware of this only thanks to Neil's post. This news hit me like a sledgehammer. I've been using pablo.rauzy.name as my main domain name for almost 20 years, and I'm going to lose it in a few months. Even more astonishing than VeriSign's unilateral and utterly irresponsible decision to terminate all third-level .name domains (even those which are paid for multiple years in advance), is ICANN's approval of this dangerous decision which breaks the registry agreement it had with VeriSign.

It's actually not the first time that I'm confronted to VeriSign's overall stupidity. Back when I registered pablo.rauzy.name, it was only possible to register third-level .name domains of the form firstname.lastname.name, and it came with a firstname@lastname.name email redirection. At some point VeriSign took control of the .name TLD and decided that the email redirection service wasn't mandatory anymore, so most registrars discontinued it and I lost my personal email address from one day to the next without any warning. To fix this, I immediately tried to get ahold of the rauzy.name second-level domain name, by contacting VeriSign who are the ones who decided to open up the possibility of second-level .name domain registration. This should have been possible since I'm the only user of this particular second-level domain, but VeriSign refused.

VeriSign's answer was that I should just let my third-level domain expire so that I could (attempt to be the first to) register the reserved second-level when it would be released and become registrable a year the grace period of my expired third-level domain. The parenthesis is mine, but is so important: in addition to lose my domain name for a whole year, I would risk the second-level being registered before me by someone else who could then credibly pretend to be me. VeriSign's suggestion was insane.

Every few years since then I tried to contact them about this, in the hope that they would have come to sense. At some point they changed their mind: reserved second-level domains would stay that way forever. Anyway, they always categorically refused to let a third-level domain name registrant to get the corresponding second-level, even when the said registrant is the only user of that second-level, as in my case.

Now, VeriSign unilaterally decided to terminate third-level .name domains despite the fact that it hugely and negatively impacts long-term customers (many of whom have their domain paid for years in advance), without even considering helping with the transition. They still refuse to let people in my situation get hold of the second-level domain they're the sole user of. And I'm far from being a unique case. Thanks to the kind journalists at Next, I've been able to get the .name zone file. It contains 22117 third-level .name domains among which 10372 are unique under their second-level. In all these cases, a direct transfer of the second-level to their registrant wouldn't cause trouble to anyone while avoiding any potential problems and risks for their registrants. And that doesn't take into accounts likely cases where there are two or three third-levels which are registered by people from the same family who wouldn't mind having one of them getting control of their second-level (and paying for a single domain name instead of two or three).

Worse than that, VeriSign plans to release all the reserved second-levels to make them available for registration a year after the third-level termination. This is plain stupid and irresponsible. At this point, either I'm the first one to get rauzy.name (at what price?) before the bots of domain squatting spammers who will want to get control of all the well referenced URLs of my website, on a domain with a strong reputation built over almost 20 years, or I'm screwed. And in the mean time, I'm forced to use another domain name anyway, so I'm screwed either way.

Moving a website to another domain name is complicated, takes a lot of time, and even impossible to do perfectly. The accumulation of almost 20 years of links to my domain name are compromised. Many of them have been posted on websites that aren't under my control so I cannot update them, a lot are on printed materials, some are engraved in the video recordings of conferences I gave. Who knows what people following those URLs, thinking they're mine, will find there if someone else takes control of my domain name in the near future? And I'm lucky that I've long not been using this domain for my email address anymore, otherwise someone getting control of my domain could receive emails addressed to me, even those sent by “I forgot my password” forms…

Worst of all: to this day, I still haven't been notified of the coming termination of my domain name by VeriSign. Without Neil Fraser's post, maybe I would still be unaware of it. How many concerned people will learn about this to late to be able to properly manage a transition to another domain name and change their email address on every service they use?

I think that one of the thing that pains me is that this shitstorm is likely caused by the fact that some asshole with an MBA had an idea that may make his employer save a few thousands dollars per year and decided it was worth getting his 2% raise even if it endangers thousands of their customers around the world…

I've got in touch with Neil Fraser. He hired a lawyer and filled a request for reconsideration with the ICANN. The request includes my domain in addition to his and a few others. It is not the first such request and a least a previous one has been denied based on VeriSign's lies that this termination won't have any effects on their customers… So I cannot count on the success of this initiative, even if I'm taking part in it and hope that it will work.

So, I'm now actively working on the move to a new domain name. Since I don't want to have to do it again in the future, I registered pablorauzy.fr, as the .fr TLD is controled by the Afnic, a French non-profit organization (that I'm now a member of) and which I trust infinitly more in the long term than the USA-based capitalist shit that is VeriSign.

I moved the website and set up automatic redirections from my .name to my .fr, but of course those will only work as long as my .name domain still exists. So I now have to find as many incoming links as possible (I've been logging HTTP referers for a couple weeks already) and for each of them try to contact the person who controls the web site the link is on to ask for an update. I'm already tired.

I was so devastated by all this that I had to find a way of making something positive out of this mess, so I took this as an opportinity for a complete redesign of my personal web site.