Neil Fraser has held neil.fraser.name for almost 25 years. He runs his website, his email and an API server on it, and he paid to keep it through 2040. His registrar recently told him it’s ending in February instead, and there’s essentially nothing he can do about it.
The reason traces back to a decision Verisign made about a domain format almost nobody remembers exists. When .name launched back in 2002, it let people register at the third level, so kevin.murphy.name and jane.murphy.name could belong to two completely different people, with Verisign controlling the shared second-level name underneath both. Alongside it came a paid email forwarding service using addresses like firstname@lastname.name. ICANN approved Verisign’s request to shut both down in May, and cleared the company to actually flip the switch on July 28, giving registrars a minimum of 90 days’ notice before deletion.
Roughly 22,000 third-level registrations face deletion, and Verisign says most sit unused, though nobody has published exactly how anyone measured that figure. That gap matters, because two registrants have already challenged the decision through ICANN‘s formal accountability process. Neither wants Verisign to keep selling these names going forward. Both want ICANN to let existing registrations survive as long as their owners keep renewing them, essentially a grandfather clause rather than a reversal.
Patrik Fältström, a former chair of ICANN’s own Security and Stability Advisory Committee, filed one of those requests. He flagged what happens after deletion as the real problem: once a third-level name disappears, whoever later registers the parent second-level name can recreate it and start receiving mail sent to an address someone used for account recovery, code signing, or device access for decades. Verisign committed to a one-year hold on second-level names tied specifically to deleted email addresses but offered no equivalent protection for the third-level domains themselves.
For hosting providers, this is a quiet but real operational task. Any customer whose mailbox, DNS zone or account-recovery address depends on a third-level .name domain loses it on deletion day, regardless of what their invoice says, and the registrar, not Verisign, is the one responsible for telling them.
