TL;DR: This blog has moved from https://andrea.corbellini.name to https://andrea.corbellini.blog. Please update all URLs pointing to this blog, and sorry for the inconvenience.

Me and .name

Back in 2014 (12 years ago), I wanted to claim my small slice of the internet, and so I purchased my first personal domain name, where I would have hosted my blog: andrea.corbellini.name. To be honest with you, I would have liked a more creative domain name, but I’m notoriously not good at giving names to things, and so I couldn’t come up with anything better than first.last.name.

For those who are not familiar with the matter, .name domains have always been special and different from other domains: when they launched (back in 2002, according to Wikipedia), they only allowed third-level domain registrations, meaning that you could register the third-level domain first.last.name, but could not register the second-level domain last.name. Second-level domains would be somewhat shared between the folks sharing the same last name. A few years later (in 2009, still according to Wikipedia), this restriction was lifted, and the ability to register second-level domains was offered.

So when I went to register my domain name I had two options: register corbellini.name or andrea.corbellini.name. I wanted to be kind to other people and so I decided to register the third-level domain, leaving corbellini.name subdomains available to other people as well. I don’t think my last name is very common, and in fact I would bet that my domain is the only one under corbellini.name even today, so perhaps we could say that my kindness was totally unnecessary. What’s sure is that my kindness did not get rewarded.

Recently, Verisign, the operator of .name domains, decided to discontinue third-level domains like mine. This means that sometime in the future, andrea.corbellini.name will disappear from the internet. It will cease to exist. Any attempt to resolve that domain name and to reach my blog will fail. Visitors will get a generic error from their browser, without any hints about what happened, why, and where my blog can be found. No redirect, no “click here to visit the new site”, nothing. The void.

A new home: .blog

I recently registered a new domain at andrea.corbellini.blog and moved my blog there. Needless to say, this time I own the whole corbellini.blog domain (also because there’s no other choice with .blog).

Right now, my .name domain redirects to my new .blog, but this won’t last forever.

I haven’t published a ton of stuff on this blog (not nearly as much as I wished), but some of the articles I published have become quite popular in their niche ecosystem, in particular my articles about Elliptic Curve Cryptography and Authenticated Encryption. I see a ton of visits from people who found links to my articles from other sites. All those links will be broken once my .name domain will be terminated, which is a shame. It’s still not very clear to me when this will happen, but it will happen at some point, so I need to ask everyone who has links pointing to my blog: please change all the URLs to my articles from .name to .blog.

The perks of .blog

I must say, while it’s certainly disappointing to have a domain name (that has served me and others for so many years) disappear in a blip without any control from me, or any concrete possibility to appeal, owning a second-level domain comes with its own perks.

One of them is that now I can enable DNSSEC, which is something I could never do with my third-level .name domain, as I had no control over the second-level domain (who knows, maybe there was a way, but I never figured it out). And in fact I’m happy to say that I did enable DNSSEC on andrea.corbellini.blog.

Another perk is that I can now use services that were not previously available to me, like Cloudflare. Services like Cloudflare in fact do not understand third-level domains and did not allow me to register with them because they wanted proof of ownership of the second-level domain. Now this is no longer an obstacle.

Reaching my blog also becomes a bit easier: https://corbellini.blog in fact redirects to https://andrea.corbellini.blog.

Perhaps an amusing fact about .blog specifically is that it’s owned and operated by a company called “Knock Knock WhoIS There, LLC”, and I find that name quite funny. Having said that, I don’t know anything about this company or their reputation.

Final remarks

I know there are a few active attempts at keeping third-level .name domains alive. A very prominent reconsideration request was recently sent by Neil Fraser. I will very likely join these attempts, although honestly I’ve witnessed so much enshittification in the past few years that I’ve lost hope in most (if not all) corporations, and I seriously doubt that things will change in this time frame. What is happening to .name domains in my opinion is a small symptom of something much bigger: the fast decay of modern corporate culture, focused on profits above anything else, to the point that screwing customers over and over has become standard practice. I doubt Verisign is going to sacrifice revenue, keep on the costs of maintaining third-level .name domains, and reverse their course of action.

And to those who are going to point out that it’s ICANN who has the power of reversing this decision, and ICANN is a non-profit organization, not one of the corporations I’m complaining about: sure, you may have a point. I don’t want to either defend nor attack ICANN’s role in this matter. The thing is that I don’t see a world where ICANN forces Verisign to do something they don’t want to do anymore, regardless of what ICANN’s intentions are.

I’m happy to be proven wrong. I truly hope this decision gets reversed and I get to keep my .name domain. But at this point I lost all hope.