At the beginning of the existence of the .name TLD you couldn't do that, you were forced to register firstname.lastname.name and provide an ID to justify registering this specific domain.

With it you got an email redirection from firstname@lastname.name to the address of your choice. At some point this feature was discontinued (I assume when VeriSign took control of the .name TLD), a bit after it was decided (again by VeriSign) to allow registering first level .name domain. My main email address stopped working from one day to another without me being warned in any way.

When this happened I've emailed VeriSign and my registrar at the time, and tried several time since then, to be able to register the first level domain I'm the only one using, but they categorically refuse, despite recognizing that a single subdomain has ever been registered. They kept saying that I could just let the domain expire, wait for the grace period, and register it once it's liberated, hoping that no one does it before me, and without any solution for the downtime in the mean time…

And now this… fuck VeriSign -_-

What a perfect example of the sort of fuckery Verisign would do. You have the simplest use case and they can't even help you transition onto the scheme THEY WANT everyone to use now.

This really sounds like VeriSign has no business owning .name … best possible outcome would be transferring it to somebody who will retain the originally intended services.

The firstname@lastname.name email forwarding is still working for me. I think only some registrars support it, though.