Verisign ends third-level .name domains: 22,000 names deleted

Two reminders from the past month that owning a domain and controlling what it serves are separate things.

.name. On 15 April Verisign asked ICANN to discontinue third-level .name registrations, the neil.fraser.name style, along with the .name email forwarding service. ICANN approved both in May and issued the formal letters on 28 July. Existing third-level names get deleted, not just closed to new sign-ups. Verisign's stated reasons were limited registrar support and declining use: about 22,000 third-level registrations, most of them unused by its count. Registrars get at least 90 days of notice and a reminder at least 30 days before the cut.

One registrant, who has run his site, email and a few device APIs on his .name address for nearly 25 years, says it is paid up until 2040 and goes dark in February. He also points at the risk if the freed second-level names are later opened for registration: whoever takes fraser.name could recreate the old address and receive its password resets. A reconsideration request is still in front of the ICANN board, after the committee reviewing it recommended on 24 August that the approvals stand. Ordinary second-level domains like yourname.name are not affected.

Cloudflare. A site owner moved nameservers to Cloudflare to serve an R2 bucket from a subdomain and found a JavaScript analytics beacon injected into a site that had no JavaScript at all. It is documented behaviour: since 15 October 2025, Cloudflare Web Analytics is on by default for proxied sites on the free plan and opt-in on paid plans. Turning it off means adding the site in the Web Analytics dashboard and disabling it there.