I cofounded Nameplanet, which morphed into GNR, and my name is in the ICANN docs for .name...
Basically, .name came out of us starting out as a webmail provider offering people to pick from ca. 60k domain names covering most common last names, because one of my co-founders and I both had [email protected] email addresses.
When ICANN opened up for new TLDs we decided to try to offer the same more broadly.
So it wasn't just the registration, but initially also email forwarding..
None of the first batch of TLDs did as well as projected, and demand for .name was well below what we'd hoped, sadly.
For .name, it was a match of less demand than we thought and people not getting the third level thing, which led to eventually abandoning it as the main offering (after I'd moved on).
We ended up selling to Verisign a few years later.
Basically, .name came out of us starting out as a webmail provider offering people to pick from ca. 60k domain names covering most common last names, because one of my co-founders and I both had [email protected] email addresses.
When ICANN opened up for new TLDs we decided to try to offer the same more broadly.
So it wasn't just the registration, but initially also email forwarding..
None of the first batch of TLDs did as well as projected, and demand for .name was well below what we'd hoped, sadly.
For .name, it was a match of less demand than we thought and people not getting the third level thing, which led to eventually abandoning it as the main offering (after I'd moved on).
We ended up selling to Verisign a few years later.