Hacker News Reader

Comment by danellis | Hacker News Reader

Really? Because when I try to transfer xxx.yyy.name, it says: "Uh-oh! Your domain yyy.name is not eligible for transfer to us." I don't own yyy.name. I own xxx.yyy.name.

(Of course xxx and yyy are placeholders here.)

Edit: xxx.yyy.name comes from the .name registry, just like xxx.co.uk comes from the .uk registry.

View on HN

If ".name" works the typical TLD way, you don't own anything. You merely have a business relationship with the owner of "ellis.name". That owner could transfer "ellis.name", but you don't own anything transferable.

Of course, ".name" might not work in the expected way, but it seems a likely explanation for the issue you report.

The owner of yyy.name is the .name registry. That's just how they work. The intention was that people register first.last.name, and that multiple people could register under the same last.name.

Then it sounds like the .name registry is also in the business of selling subdomains, i.e. they're the owner of yyy.name. In other words, it's not possible for Namecheap to rent you xxx.yyy.name, because to do that they'd have to be the owner of yyy.name, and they're not.

Sounds like the tech support agent and supervisor got it basically right.

They're not really subdomains. If you try to do a whois against e.g. smith.name you'll see it's not a registerable domain. Only the second level can be registered, xxxx.smith.name. Similarly if you had xxxx.co.uk, you own a domain because co.uk isn't registerable. The only quirk about .name is that common names can't be registered at the top level, but uncommon ones can.

> it's not possible for Namecheap to rent you xxx.yyy.name

I'm sure they could if they wanted to. Gandi will happily do it for $15/year. I can only assume they've decided it's not worth their time to do so.

Early on (nearly 20 years ago) it was possible to register a yyy.name by itself. For example, I own the domain for my last name.

Only the owner of yyy.name can do those kind of transfers.

Your xxx.yyy.name is a subdomain of yyy.name and thus beholden to it. Unless it's something like a .co.uk domain, which with you mentioning .name isn't the case.

Who is the owner of yyy.name, though? I'd say that's the registry itself.

I don't think you can transfer because the domain doesn't belong to you. yyy.name is the domain, you're "renting" from whoever owns that domain name.

I understand that domains are just rented and not owned, but in common parlance it's usual to talk about owning a domain.

But you don't even own a domain

Whom do you pay for xxx.yyy.name?

Like I said in my first post, I pay Gandi.

Look, you can register one yourself: https://imgur.com/tIESzRr

You're surely familiar with domains like foo.co.uk? You don't have to own co.uk to own or transfer foo.co.uk, even though it's the uk registry, not the co.uk registry.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com