.name Termination

What does Verisign care though? It's been that way for way over a decade since they started allowing 2LD registrations. I very highly doubt they are suddenly so worried about random individuals' personal internet security.

It has to be a money problem. Something they want to do will be simpler if this is no longer a quirky registry. And they know they'll get the money back that they lose from not having bob.smith pay -- probably by throwing all the "last names" once registered this way into some "premium name" bucket and selling them for $1000 and up instead of the ~$10 that zyzgdhaf234.name fetches.

In fact, I'm not sure that scheme isn't the reason itself.

From what it sounds like, unlike domains under other TLDs, when you purchase a domain under .name you always purchase specifically the three-segment domain.

i.e. I own john.doe.name, you own george.joe.name. Once this change goes through, only "doe.name" can be owned, so who gets it?

The correct way to handle this mess is to simply keep things messy. BGP tables are a big mess, for example, because a lot of companies keep their IPs when going from ISP to ISP.

But, assuming that Verisign can’t keep third level domains (as a DNS implementer, I don’t think third level domains is a huge deal; see thread below):

* Third level names where only one person has the second level domain should be transferred to whoever owns that single third level name.

* Third level names where multiple people have the same second level domain should be put up for closed bidding: Only current owners of .name domains with a given second level domain name (e.g. last name) will be able to bid for the second-level domain. So, if one has john.smith.name and joe.smith.name, Joe Smith and John Smith will be in a bidding war for smith.name.

If the issue of .name not being in public suffix is a real issue, Verisign can handle that by disabling new third-level .name registrations, and provide Public Suffix with a list of those registrations (just send all the owners a privacy notice, making it clear that the existence of the name will be made public for security reasons). More reading: https://github.com/publicsuffix/list/issues/2306 (There seems to be issues with this list being too long to keep in the Public Suffix because there’s too much software out there which can’t handle it. That seems strange to me: Even here in 2026 where RAM costs far too much, Deadwood can store a list of 240,000 blacklisted entries in under 10 megs; there are about 22,000 three-level .name domains and I could store that list in a way that could be very quickly looked up in about a meg of memory)

Now, personally, I think Verisign can keep these messy third level names, and are doing things this way so that Neil Fraser has to compete with every single 2-bit cybersquatter out there for the rights to fraser.name.

As an aside, it’s trivial to have DNS servers handle multi-level domains without having to have a zone file for every level; e.g. https://this.is.a.long.name.maradns.org works, and there’s no zone file for name.maradns.org, long.name.maradns.org, a.long.name.maradns.org, and so on.

Also, since people have brought up the “org fuckery” without providing details: https://bluecatnetworks.com/press/the-org-domain-sale-explai...

You know dang well if .org was owned by an investment entity, they would had jacked up the prices as much as they could get away with.

The Public Suffix List is the closest thing we have to the "subdomain/TLD bit", but afaik it doesn't include wildcards like `*.name`. It does influence TLS though (or possibly just browsers) in that a wildcard cert for an entire TLD or public suffix won't be honored, nor will a public CA issue such a cert.

Still, I'm not sure there's any easy technical fix for the .name debacle.

You can almost guess someone's age from that alone - they're more rare, but long domain names still appear that encode a city and a state, and you could just "grab" the first part when signing up.