Following ICANN's dubious decision to allow the termination of all the special .name third-level domains (3LDs)1, several longtime-holders of such domain names have submitted requests to have the decision reconsidered. Neil Fraser submitted his request including representation for a further eight individuals. Patrik Fältström is trying to hold on to the great domain name stupid.domain.name2, which has a 2LD shared with at least seven other users.
Stefan Böck uses stefan.boeck.name and had given up resisting the change after a similar request for reconsideration (RfR) was met with the recommendation that it should be rejected. He pulled the zone data for the domain and took issue with articles counting the affected users as ~22k because of an additional 15k MX records for the first@last.name forwarding service which was part of the same setup3. He has now added these details as an additional document to the several other RfRs regarding the .name terminations.
Neil Fraser posted an update on his website on 04 October4 confirming his 17-page submission and detailing how some registrars were telling customers the email notifying them of the change was a scam that they should ignore. He also confirmed Verisign are still accepting money to renew the 3LDs beyond the planned termination date of February 2027. The best part though is the handwritten letter from his 10-year-old daughter pleading with "Mr Icann" to not take her internet away.
The owner of troy.rollo.name submitted a 24-page appeal5 with all the usual arguments about being sold a domain "for life" and the security risks associated with new .name registrations at the second level (also highlighting that companies such as Yahoo, Google and Microsoft do not recycle their free email addresses). He focuses even more on the email aspect, describing how many sites and services essentially use your email address as username, don't offer an option to update it and how some sites have even refused to update the address associated with the account. He also detailed how he has registered hundreds of addresses using the domain to segregate his emails - a security practice he argues is common among technically proficient users, a demographic who he believes were specifically attracted to the .name domain.
Verisign's desire to terminate the 3LDs stems from .name's unique setup where users buy joe.bloggs.name so the registrar has to register bloggs.name to the registry and then grants joe.bloggs.name to the user. Then Jane Bloggs can still register jane.bloggs.name because Joe Bloggs does not control bloggs.name. This adds a level of complexity disliked by the registrars since they have to record two fields for a .name domain registration instead of one, but Troy Rollo offers a solution to this problem:
RFC 5890 creates a reserved category of LDH labels, known as R-LDH labels, with a minus sign in the third and fourth characters, for use in providing for an encoding scheme in LDH labels. The registry operator could use an R-LDH scheme to encode the two levels into one so that registrars need no, or very limited, special casing, for example:
(a) the scheme might use “ml--” as the prefix, followed by a number of levels (2), followed by numbers indicating the number of ASCII characters in each level, followed by the labels for each level concatenated together;
(b) in that scheme, “john.smith.name” could be encoded as “ml--2-4johnsmith.name”;
(c) this scheme would allow registrars who are unwilling to special-case the third level domains to treat them as second level domains on their side, with the special casing being entirely, or almost entirely, on the registry side of the transaction – that is, the “ml--2-4-johnsmith.name” string can be propagated through to the EPP payload, with the registry treating it internally as an alias for “john.smith.name”;
(d) the kinds of registrants who use “.name” domains, being in general at a high level of sophistication, will have little difficulty applying that scheme to continue to maintain their existing domains (or potentially register new ones, at least under second level domains where there are already third level domains) with registrars who do not support the third level domains directly;
(e) this scheme is viable for all but about 5 or 6 existing third level domains with long names that would exceed the limit for LDH names in this encoding – it would be trivial to add an alternative, ID based encoding, for continuing to manage those domains, although one might question whether they are in serious use.
Doytchin Spiridonov has also added a document to the .name termination RfRs highlighting an issue with registrars like TuCows which have disabled auto-renewals and prevented renewals due before February - so even if ICANN do see sense and reconsider Verisign's request some registrants could still lose their domains. And finally, Irv Lustig added a document supporting the requests, expressing frustration that his registrar confirmed he would not receive a partial refund (despite having paid up until 2030) and anger at Verisign for continuing to advertise .name while planning to terminate it6. Although the linked page is seemingly advertising .name 2LDs which were opened up for registration later and which Verisign would still like to offer.