I cofounded Nameplanet, which morphed into GNR, and my name is in the ICANN docs for .name...

Basically, .name came out of us starting out as a webmail provider offering people to pick from ca. 60k domain names covering most common last names, because one of my co-founders and I both had firstname@lastname.tld email addresses.

When ICANN opened up for new TLDs we decided to try to offer the same more broadly.

So it wasn't just the registration, but initially also email forwarding..

None of the first batch of TLDs did as well as projected, and demand for .name was well below what we'd hoped, sadly.

For .name, it was a match of less demand than we thought and people not getting the third level thing, which led to eventually abandoning it as the main offering (after I'd moved on).

We ended up selling to Verisign a few years later.

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slartibardfast0 18 hours ago | parent [-]

thanks for trying, fwiw it made a beautiful domain for java source code back in the day. i hope you can do a long form retrospective on the .name story someday

do you think there's any point in contacting ICANN or Verisign? i'd be sad to lose mine!

it's wild how long some third level domains are still pre-registered for and how little an email forward must cost to run (at the sub-registrar level?)

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vidarh 10 hours ago | parent [-]

It can't hurt to try to contact someone, but I doubt Verisign would listen. Already back then (we contracted them to run the registry backend, over my objections) they were stuffed full of bureaucrats. Maybe ICANN.

I left back in 2003, so can really only talk about the origin. By 2003 we cut staff massively, and after completing a reference registrar platform and laying off most of my team there wasn't really much left for me to do, so I left too...

The guy I originally got the shared domain idea with stuck around with a few of the early developers. Our other co-founders were out at that point.

Most of the fun was the initial mail platform and the registrar platform, both of which leaned heavily on qmail - the latter as a queuing system to decouple everything. Email as a messaging bus works very well...

But the .name process was like pulling teeth. One interesting thing is to look at our original ICANN contract and appendices compared to .biz and .info. We had to supply somewhere around 200 pages extra technical detail for "reasons" that seemed to boil down to us not knowing the right people.

Meanwhile dot-biz got away with maybe 30 pages including things like copy-pasting BNF that had no real relevance.

We ended up working round the clock to provide technical details the others weren't even asked for.

Not sure if someone wanted us to fail, or what the motivation was exactly, but the process was clearly not fair.

	▲	slartibardfast0 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		ah that's wild that top-level owned the MX records and mail relay server infra! thanks very much for sharing. i'm going to send a few old fashioned letters. my registrar said only, we can't give legal advice, ICANN going to ICANN ;)