What's in a (domain) name?

This website, and my e-mail and other associated services, are now also available via a new domain: paul.kishimoto.eu. Why is that?

The .name top-level domain was launched in 2002 to allow people to represent their own personal names in their web presence. For exactly this reason, I registered paul.kishimoto.name in July 2006, and have used it for more than 20 years. In 2026, two things have changed.

First, it was proposed in April that all third-level registrations (like x.y.name) would be terminated as of early 2027. (See another report by Neil Fraser, and ongoing coverage by Kevin Murphy at Domain Incite.) This happened because the original delegate for managing .name, the London, GB company Global Name Registry, was sold in 2008 to VeriSign, a large, US company that also controls .com and .net. Every top-level domain similarly is managed by some organization; for instance, the .ca country-code top-level domain is administered by CIRA, a Canada-based non-profit whose members elect its board of directors. Organizations like CIRA or VeriSign can propose changes to ICANN, a US-based organization that oversees the Domain Name System (DNS). Because VeriSign is a for-profit company, their choices in managing .name and their other TLDs are motivated mainly by profit, and only constrained by ICANN, if at all.

Second, in August the US government targeted the Italian anti-fascist organization Autistici/Inventati (A/I) for…being opposed to fascism. [1] One avenue of attack was a designation that made it illegal for US-based entities do to business with A/I. It so happened that A/I used the domain name austistici.org, and the .org top-level domain is managed by Public Interest Registry (PIR) which, although a non-profit, is based in the US. Rather than refuse or take action against the legal designation, PIR immediately deregistered A/I's domain, taking them offline.

The combination of these two events leads to some tough choices. Although legal challenges against VeriSign's action are pending, there is no guarantee they will succeed, in which case paul.kishimoto.name will vanish around March 2027. It seems VeriSign intends to make second-level domains—such as kishimoto.name—available for registration, which means anyone with a quick trigger finger and enough money could register that domain and then impersonate me. I might be faced with the choice to either risk that impersonation or, in effect, pay a hefty ransom to get the second-level domain myself. Even if the termination is averted, the .name TLD remains in the control of a for-profit, US-based registrar, which means that if the US government goes on to target more anti-fascist organzations or individuals [2] in the same manner as A/I, VeriSign could choose to comply and cancel a .name registration.

So, although there are today many, many TLDs available—like .fun or .games— it turns out that nearly all of these are controlled by US-based organizations, thus not any more reliable than .name, .com, .org, etc.

This logic brought me eventually past most generic TLDs to options like .at (Austria, where I currently live) or .eu, and ultimately I went with the latter. .eu is managed by EURid (1, 2), and contains the second-level domain .europa.eu used by the European Union for the web presence of its many institutions. Although the US can and does target international organizations via sanctions, [3] actions against EURid would in theory give them power over .eu and thus .europa.eu, and one can hope the EU would resist. (Let's hope we don't have to find out!)

Thus for the time being:

[1]“Are We the Baddies?”
[2]I am, of course, anti-fascist!
[3]For example, A/I was debanked because the US also targeted its banking provider, Banca Etica.

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