The Daily Diff · Thursday, September 3, 2026 · watch the episode
- Verisign deletes 22,000 .name domains
+ Audacity 4.0 rebuilt on Qt
+ Qwen 3.8 27B on Cerebras: 1,500 tok/s
- Antigravity TOS: your Google account
+ OpenAI ships GPT-6 AstraAbout 22,000 people are about to lose their websites, their email addresses and, literally, their names — because a company that makes $435 million a quarter found the paperwork annoying.
Yesterday a Google engineer called Neil Fraser published a post titled “.name Termination”. It hit 2,213 points on Hacker News, beating Audacity 4.0, a Qwen model running at 1,500 tokens a second, and a Google terms-of-service clause that can delete your Gmail for using the wrong editor.
What .name is
.name launched in 2002 as a third-level system: first.last.name, so john.doe.name and jane.doe.name could belong to two different people, each with an email address “for life”. Every other domain you own is two levels; this one was three by design.
Neil Fraser registered neil.fraser.name on 19 February 2002, writing that he wanted “a domain that will not obsolesce quite so quickly” — the most optimistic sentence ever committed to HTML. It hosts his site, his email and the APIs his IoT devices talk to, and it is paid for until 2040. In February 2027 it stops resolving.
He also picked .name specifically because it was not run by Verisign. In 2008 Verisign bought the registry. Moving house to escape your neighbour, and then he buys the building.
The paperwork
On 15 April 2026 Verisign filed a Registry Services Evaluation request to discontinue third-level registrations, citing “declining usage and limited registrar support”. The entire Benefits section reads: “will increase efficiency for the operation of the .name TLD.”
Question 2.1 asks what effect the change will have on the life cycle of domain names. Verisign’s answer: “None.” The same form says existing third-level names “will be deleted”. So the life cycle is unaffected the way a guillotine doesn’t affect the life cycle of a neck.
ICANN approved it on 7 May and published the letter on 28 July. Verisign had consulted the registrars, who found no security, stability or competition issues — the only three things ICANN is allowed to check. Registrants weren’t asked; footnote 1 explains that’s the registrar’s job. The fire inspector’s checklist does not contain fire.
The last time Verisign changed the DNS unilaterally was Site Finder in 2003, when every .com typo went to a Verisign search page and ICANN shut it down in 19 days. The “days since Verisign’s last DNS surprise” counter stood at 8,389. It is now zero.
Worse than losing a website
Once the third levels are deleted, the vacant second level — fraser.name — presumably becomes available. Whoever registers it can recreate neil.fraser.name, receive 24 years of password resets and push commits with his identity. It’s an eviction where the landlord leaves your keys under the mat with your name engraved on them.
Global Name Registry’s own website in June 2002: “As your .name can be registered for up to 10 years and ownership is renewable, your .name really can be yours for life.” Wikipedia has already moved that sentence to the past tense.
Why bother?
Verisign runs 179.1 million .com and .net domains; 22,000 names is 0.012 % of that base. In the same quarter it filed the request it reported $435 million of revenue, and its CEO celebrated “29 years of 100 % availability” for .com — a record .name registrants will now support by not existing.
One registrant filed a reconsideration request in June; the board committee recommended denying it in August, on the grounds that early termination “does not impact the life cycle”: a life cycle begins at registration and ends at deletion — which is also how a hitman describes a life cycle.
Verisign promises registrars 90 days’ notice and a 30-day reminder. Nobody has named the day in February. I’ll assume Friday.
Side stories
Audacity 4.0 — a full rebuild on Qt with a dark theme, dockable panels and a new .aup4 format that converts your old projects one way. Missing for now: mixer, MIDI tracks, macros. The release notes end with “we had the audacity to change the Audacity logo” — the only pun in open source that earns its keep.
Qwen 3.8 27B on Cerebras — about 1,500 tokens/s, $0.99 in / $1.49 out per million, 128K context on paid tiers. The top HN comment notes the developer tier caps you at 150,000 tokens a minute, so at full speed you hit the limit in 100 seconds — the fastest anyone has ever been told to slow down.
Google Antigravity TOS — per Gergely Orosz, the terms say that if Google suspects third-party use, it can suspend your Google account — not your Antigravity account. The price of a free IDE is your Gmail and your Drive.
Verdict: REVERT — Deleting paid-up names, then selling the parent domain, is a hijack with a filing number.
Sources
Neil Fraser, “.name Termination” — https://neil.fraser.name/news/2026/09/03/
Neil Fraser, “New Domain!” (2002) — https://neil.fraser.name/news/2002/02/19/
Hacker News thread — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49550772 · day page https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2026-09-03
Verisign RSEP request 01581614 (15 Apr 2026) — https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/consensus-policies/rsep-2026013-name-request-15-04-2026-en.pdf
ICANN approval letter (28 Jul 2026) — https://itp.cdn.icann.org/en/files/consensus-policies/fessenden-to-kane-2-28-07-2026-en.pdf
ICANN Reconsideration Request 26-2 — https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/reconsideration-26-2-spiridonov-request-2026-06-04-en
Global Name Registry, June 2002 (Wayback) — https://web.archive.org/web/20020609132126/http://nic.name/consumer/summary_main.html
Wikipedia: .name — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.name · Site Finder — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_Finder
Verisign Q2 2026 results — https://markets.financialcontent.com/stocks/article/bizwire-2026-7-23-verisign-reports-second-quarter-2026-results
Public Suffix List issue #2306 — https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/issues/2306
Domain Name Wire — https://domainnamewire.com/2026/09/03/third-level-dot-name/
Audacity 4.0 release — https://github.com/audacity/audacity/releases/tag/Audacity-4.0.0 · video
Cerebras model catalog — https://inference-docs.cerebras.ai/models/overview · https://inference-docs.cerebras.ai/models/qwen-3.8-27b
OpenAI, GPT-6 Astra — https://openai.com/index/gpt-6-astra/
Tweets —
That’s today’s diff. I’m Niko from Axrisi — merge responsibly.
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