My thoughts also, but maybe they can make more from a few sites like baby.name than they can from personal domains.

It works differently than pretty much every other TLD, which means it's different code paths to support.

Many registrars don't support the unique 3rd level domain setup for .name, so it can be hard to find registrars that properly support it.

It's probably easier to support, and more valuable to sell second level .name domains.

Pretty terrible that they were considering just dropping tens of thousands of customer registrations however.

> It works differently than pretty much every other TLD, which means it's different code paths to support.

but I was told that AI has made code obsolete and free

It has weird interactions with some modern browser features. For example domain isolation doesn't apply between subdomains of the same TLD, so john.smith.name and drew.smith.name don't get isolation in naive implementations.

wouldn't that be a problem with a lot of other domains? like locality domains

It definitely is. <ingress>.k8s.<mydns>.com regularly confuses what password I want to use if I have different authentication per ingress. More commonly if I run something else at <name>.<mydns>.com firefox and chrome are both happy to offer up my password for <other service>.<mydns>.com.

Closed. Wont fix.

yes, but other locality domains are fairly static and well-known

.co.uk wouldn't have the same problem because everyone knows that combo is a TLD in and of itself. with a seemingly infinite possible combinations of blah.name that could be a TLD itself, or, might just be a subdomain of .name, it gets really weird

We solve that problem with the public suffix list. The problem is there's a lot of .name domains, each of which would need to be added to the list.

The real problem is that we'd have to add a wildcard to the public suffix list. That's it.

The public suffix list is the big list of all the URL suffixes that should not imply shared ownership of all their subdomains. For example the line

com

says "XYZ.com" and "ABC.com" should not be assumed to be controlled by the same entity.

Problem is, all 1st level domains registered to the .name TLD should be added to the list, and that's a lot of domains. The correct answer, IMO, would be to add a wildcard

*.name

but that would involve updating all the code that relies on the public suffix list to support said wildcard.