VeriSign says, "not in your.name"

Back in May, Kevin Murphy at Domain Incite reported VeriSign were to stop offering the third-level domains (3LDs) that defined the .name gTLD for twenty-five years because they couldn't be bothered maintaining the unique setup*¹. Global Name Registry (GNR) originally designed the TLD so that domains were registered at the third level (eg firstname.surname.name) though available 2LDs were offered later. Crucially, not just happy with no longer offering the 3LDs going forward, VeriSign also managed to have ICANN approve a decision to terminate all existing ones.

I noticed last week that Neil Fraser left a comment*² on Kevin's article highlighting the huge personal impact this would have on him and his neil.fraser.name domain:

Ooh, this is fun. There are thousands of embedded systems around the world with my website hard-coded into the firmware. I’ve spent a quarter century writing software and services on this domain. And in six months it’s all bricks.

A cursory internet search for -neil.fraser.name site:.fraser.name suggests perhaps even nobody else using a subdomain of fraser.name (in a crawlable web capacity anyway) - once VeriSign has completed its purge, I was hopeful that Neil would be able to take control of the 2LD fraser.name in order to regain neil.fraser.name but obviously there would be no guarantee. There are some 22k other .name registrants though where the 2LD domain could be shared and they won't all be able to register it (I can see at least three 3LDs for smith.name).

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Yesterday, Neil posted a heartfelt message on his aforementioned website*³ detailing how one of the reasons he chose .name was precisely because it was not operated by VeriSign (unfortunately they ended up taking control a few years later). To add insult to injury, he has already paid for the domain up until 2040 while he is set to have it taken away from him in February 2027. He is understandably concerned not only about the risk of not being able to acquire fraser.name after this time, but that somebody else can and would gain access to an untold number of accounts and systems tied to his email address.

He suggests he is looking to take legal action - maybe there is the possibility of a class-action lawsuit. I'm hoping I can look forward to reading a new entry on his website announcing a positive outcome. In the meantime, I highly recommend having a browse of his neil.fraser.name website where you can find incredible answers to important questions such as "Would a Lava Lamp work in a high-gravity environment such as Jupiter?"*⁴