True, they can’t outright prevent the ambiguity, but much fewer people will go to the trouble of establishing such subdomains when the option isn’t directly offered by the registrar.

This is my theory because, a priori, 3LDs should be more profitable than 2LDs, because with 3LDs John Doe and Jane Doe don’t have to compete over doe.name, but instead can each separately purchase john.doe.name and jane.doe.name. Apparently, however, that’s not a benefit of 3LDs in practice, which leads me to conclude that john-doe.name and jane-doe.name just sell better.

Prior to reading the OP blog post, I had never looked into the particular rules that .name has.

To me, prior to knowing how it works, I would have assumed that either

a) john.doe.name would be a subdomain that someone who was just starting out had gotten for free supported by ads. Similar to having johndoe.freewebs.com back in the day. Not something most people would use for anything professional.

or,

b) doe.name was registered by one of the people in a family of Doe’s where every Doe is pretty closely related. For example, John of john.doe.name and Jane of jane.doe.name are husband and wife, or third cousins, or what have you. Most of the content, I would assume, is mostly about things that relate to the family. Like maybe one guy is doing a family genealogy project tracing the roots of this little cluster of Doe’s back in time. And another one probably has some photo albums with pictures of like previous Thanksgivings and other family get togethers. In other words, nothing I would care about unless I was in their family or a very close friend of the family.

I would not have guessed that .name worked the way that it did if I hadn’t read about it.

And on the other hand, if I saw just http://www.doe.name or http://johndoe.name, I would not make such assumptions. It would be not much different than seeing www.doe.com or johndoe.com respectively. I would just assume that .com was already taken and therefore they used .name, or that they happened to like the .name TLD because it emphasises that their site has their name as domain name.

> This is my theory because, a priori, 3LDs should be more profitable than 2LDs,

3LDs are less valuable. In a market of many different tlds, why register foo.bar.name when you could get foobar.name or foobar.something_else