alt Hacker NewsNo, they were not planning that. This is only about 3rd level domain as the paragraph you quoted says. Every other TLD don't sell those (afaik). Normally "someone.name" would be a domain, and they would own all the subdomains. .name allowed you to register "one.someone.name" and "two.someone.name" as completely separated domains with completely separated owners. I understand why they should grandfather in existing domains but this was just madness.
Ah, fair enough. I kind of thought that third level domain registration was the whole point of the .name TLD, so I was interpreting it as shutting it down.
So the weird part then comes in: are all second level domains that have third level registrations now reserved? Do they stop being reserved if the last third level registration expires without being renewed?