Namespaces

The seventeen namespaces

Every portal name ends in one of seventeen namespaces. Each one fixes the name’s family, its scheme, the direction it opens in by default, its yearly fee, and how the registrant is verified. This table is read from the registry’s own namespace table when these docs are built.

Whether a namespace is open, its price, its verification level and its rules text are settings an administrator can change at runtime: every fee is stored as namespaces.price_cents and read from there, never hard-coded. This table shows the values the registry starts from, which are the ones the standard sets, and the registry enforces whatever is set. The live values are served by GET /v1/namespaces. Only .government starts closed. A registration runs for a 12-month term and renews yearly.

The former .experience namespace is gone: storylines now live in six experience namespaces, opened with experience://. Movies, music and books, once a family of their own, are experiences too.

The scheme lock

The four identity namespaces always resolve through activate://; the six experience namespaces always resolve through experience://; every other namespace, the Destinations, always resolves through portal://. The namespace decides, never the person typing. A client that receives another scheme corrects it and proceeds with normal verification. It never fails or warns because of the scheme alone, and no new scheme exists without a revision of the standard.

These are the answers of the registry’s schemeLock(), computed while this page was built:

How addresses are parsed and corrected is on Names and addresses.

Prices and the realm application

Fees are yearly and set per namespace, so a name’s price matches its weight on the Mesh (PNS section 13):

• A free name, an .avatar, completes checkout at once, with no payment step. It is your key to every portal.
• The $20 yearly .character fee includes a year of hosting on Jubilee’s Character Server with 50 GB of memory storage. Storage beyond that is billed at $0.03 per GB per month, on the card on file.
• Subnames are made by the owner of their parent name at no charge, and renew with it.

A realm is an application

A realm is a whole universe others enter, so it is an application, not a checkout:

1. The applicant files a realm charter: its purpose, its rules, its content rating, and its Responsible Guardian, a living person who answers for the realm.
2. Checkout holds the $1,000 on the card; nothing is charged yet, and the name keeps its label while it waits.
3. A person at Jubilee decides. Approval takes the held payment and the realm is paid; a rejection releases the hold, nothing is charged, and the label is free again.
4. A realm with no live destination beneath it within six months of its approval lapses.

A charter’s content rating is one of four words, each with the youngest verified age it admits. The Portal Server reads any other word as adult, so the registry accepts only these:

While this page was built, the contract’s isContentRating accepted "teen" and refused "All ages": the label is for people, the word is what a charter carries. “Adult” means hard history and mature themes told with care; sexual content is never allowed anywhere on the Mesh. An experience’s own rating is different: its signed TXT rating keeps a label such as PG-13 beside a minAge, which is what a door reads.

See the charter routes. Checkout without a filed charter is refused with charter_required.

Rules against squatting

Three rules apply to every namespace (PNS section 13):

1. No resale. A transfer is started by the holder, accepted by the recipient, and then approved by Jubilee, which charges the recipient its cost, if any. Both people affirm that no money changed hands for the name. A Family character never moves to an organization, and an avatar never moves at all.
2. Live within 90 days. A name that is not live within 90 days of payment lapses, after two warnings by email, 30 and 10 days before. A name that was never seen has no former character to protect, so it is released at once; one that was born gets a death certificate first.
3. Verified accounts, and a review past about ten names. Every account is identity-verified (a person) or verified (an organization) before its first paid registration; without it, checkout answers identity_required. An account that holds more than ten names waits for a person at Jubilee before it registers more (account_review). Clearing the review lets the account hold about ten more; restricting it stops new registrations, and names already held are not affected.

The namespace’s own verification still applies on top of the account’s. Jubilee’s own accounts are exempt from the review and the 90-day rule, because Jubilee registers the reserved names it curates.

Directions: go and bring

• Go: the user enters the place or the storyline.
• Bring: the identity or the work comes to the user, wherever they are (a living room, a headset, a phone).

Identities, movies, music and books default to Bring; Destinations, history, events and games default to Go. Direction is a setting, never a scheme. A portal may allow both: its ENDPOINT record lists the directions it allows in directions. An address can ask for the other one with ?dir=go or ?dir=bring.

The resolver decides the direction from the signed ENDPOINT record, in this order:

1. the direction the address asked for, if the ENDPOINT allows it;
2. otherwise the namespace’s default direction, if the ENDPOINT allows it;
3. otherwise the first direction the ENDPOINT lists.

When the request is overridden, the answer carries a notice such as “This portal does not allow go; it opens as bring.” See Resolution.

Verification levels

Every namespace has a verification level: what the registry checks before a name is born. Two-factor authentication is required for every registrant at every level, and every account is verified before its first paid registration (above).

Verification does not stop at registration. Names are re-reviewed on reports or changes, and every character, place and experience offers a Report button. A report that involves a minor asks Jubilee to suspend the name at once, while it is reviewed.

Required records

PNS Record Standard section 5 lists the records each namespace needs before activation. A name may be registered with records missing, but the registry will not activate it, and portal.js refuses to open it, until every one is present and verifies.

The registry itself makes the ID, STATUS and CERT records when the name is born, and the GUARDIAN record of every .character, all signed with the Jubilee root key. CERT is not on the required list, but every born name has one. Everything else is signed by the owner with the name’s own key. See Records and signing.

Relationship labels

Identity names carry a relationship label on the birth certificate, describing the identity’s role toward the people behind it. Every label starts with “AI”. Labels describe roles and a chain of responsibility only; they do not create human employment status, legal personhood, or human rights, and every certificate says so.

• A person’s .character is a Family character with one Parent, shown as father or mother; its label comes from its Character DNA: AI Son, AI Daughter or AI Child for a humanoid, AI Pet for a pet, AI Animal for any other creature. An organization’s is a Worker character with a named Responsible Guardian. See Characters.
• “Cannot register” means that kind of account is refused: an organization cannot register an avatar.
• Destinations and experiences carry no relationship label.
• An organization gives an accountable point of contact when it sets up its account. It is kept private and never appears on a certificate or a public record.

Standard subdomain labels and Bible addresses

Top-level namespaces stay few and broad; specifics go in standard labels beneath a registered name. These are conventions, not reservations: the owner of the name creates them as subnames. The full subdomain label standard is still to be defined.

There is no .church namespace: a church is portal://church.gracefellowship.ministry, and its sermons are experiences, experience://sermon.gracefellowship.event. A ministry’s place and its experiences are separate addresses; its page links to its sermons.

Bible passages read inside out: chapter, book, translation. 23.psalms.jsv.book is Psalm 23 in the JSV, 1.23.psalms.jsv.book its first verse, and psalms.jsv.book the whole book. A label beneath a registered name may be as short as one character, so chapter and verse numbers work; a registered name itself still needs three. bible.book is reserved by Jubilee as the front door to the Bible, pointing to the JSV. See Names and addresses.

Who may register, and how many

• .business, .ministry and .education are for organization accounts; .home and .avatar are for individual accounts. A Family character is registered by a person, a Worker character by an organization.
• A person holds one primary avatar and may add contextual avatars directly beneath it, such as jubilee.gabrielungureanu.avatar, currently up to four. An avatar can never be transferred.
• The owner of a name may create subnames under it without paying again, such as crucifixion.yourministry.history. A subname shares its parent’s verified owner.
• Each account may start a limited number of new top-level names per namespace in a period: currently 10 every 30 days, or 100 for a verified organization. Past about ten names held, the account review applies (above).

Namespace by namespace

The rules below are the plain-language text the registry shows before checkout.