What does Verisign care though? It's been that way for way over a decade since they started allowing 2LD registrations. I very highly doubt they are suddenly so worried about random individuals' personal internet security.

It has to be a money problem. Something they want to do will be simpler if this is no longer a quirky registry. And they know they'll get the money back that they lose from not having bob.smith pay -- probably by throwing all the "last names" once registered this way into some "premium name" bucket and selling them for $1000 and up instead of the ~$10 that zyzgdhaf234.name fetches.

In fact, I'm not sure that scheme isn't the reason itself.