alt Hacker NewsThe idea is:
* .name is open for everybody
* a company called "Global Name Registry" scooped up a BUNCH of common last names, including fraser.name
* Global Name Registry then sold access to neil.fraser.name for far cheaper than the fraser.name domain would cost on its own; someone else could also buy john.fraser.name or jane.fraser.name, so the single fraser.name domain that they owned could have dozens of customers associated to it. They worked with ICANN to allow each domain to have its own registered owner.
* The article in the OP bought neil.fraser.name and has used it for years
* Verisign bought Global Name Registry; later they realized, hey, we're sorta not making a lot of money on this idea, and we're spending a lot of time/resources maintaining these domains "for cheap" and chasing renewals, and not scooping up more customers. Let's just stop it and stop paying for fraser.name and the potentially hundreds of other domains we own.
* Neil Fraser, not the only Fraser in the world, is upset because he might lose the domain he's had forever
So one CAN buy the mwai.name domain, as you have, and continue using vpn.mwai.name just fine. It's just you can't "officially" start selling out these subdomains as a separate registrar entry.
Replies
You should post it as a top level comment, I finally understood the situation exactly here.
Oh, I get it, I guess the question is what will Verisign do with the surname.name domains. They could be auctioned individually or by bulk, and somebody could buy them. But in essence they are exercising their right as a 2ld holder (Global Name Registry) to stop providing service.
This is an ostensibly uncharacteristic move for verisign, but the customers that bought these 2ld did so from a non-verisign vendor, it is only after verisign bought the 2ld holder that they became the holders and are now proceeding to extinguishing them after embracing and extending.
Might be an anti-trust case. Like textbook clear-cut case. IANAL, this is not legal advice.
Thank you for the clarification. Not sure if it was the author's intent but they made it sound like .name will cease to exist.
Is this quite accurate? My reading was that Global Name Registry was the registrar for the .name TLD, with Verisign providing DNS and email forwarding services, but that for several years GNR would only grant registration to third-level domains, then would set up corresponding second-level domains and email forwarding.
I guess in practice it doesn't make much of a difference for me anymore, I registered mwai.name 20 years after they began allowing second-level registrations and more than 15 years after GNR was sold to Verisign. So presumably GNR's concept was long-abandoned by the time I made my registration (which was, to be truthful, mostly based on mwai.name being the cheapest domain with the initialism). I was more curious about the implications of having held a second-level domain, whether it could have caused trouble for me or for a different person who held a tertiary domain. But also my registrar at least doesn't seem to allow tertiary domain registration for .name.
Any any case, nothing in OP or any of its referenced sources suggest Verisign is giving up .name. rather they will stop accepting and serving tertiary registrations, so if Neil wants to keep his domain he or another beneficent Fraser will need to register the fraser.name domain and register the subdomains for neil, joe, jill, or whichever other fraser currently owns a tertiary domain. The same would be the case for anyone else who still held a tertiary domain. Perhaps Verisign or the registrars who work with them might be able to migrate the registrations of anyone with these domains, particularly in what I suspect are most cases where there is a single tertiary registration under a secondary domain. Perhaps offer fraser.name to Neil and he can add his own subdomains.
I was intending to replying to a different comment on the above thread, sorry if this made my previous reply a bit incoherent.