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.

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 ;)