Neil Fraser’s website lives at neil.fraser.name, one of the roughly 22,000 third-level .name addresses that Verisign planned to delete. On 10 November he posted about it and started with two words: “We won!”
In the third post of this series I wrote that whoever still used such an address would lose it. For existing addresses, that is no longer the plan.
What Verisign wrote
On 5 November, Patrick Kane, senior vice president for naming and directory services at Verisign, wrote to ICANN. The letter first recaps the timeline: two requests filed on 15 April 2026, ICANN’s approval on 28 July, and a 180-day notice to registrars on 15 August.
In the next paragraph it changes course: Verisign will keep supporting existing third-level names and existing email forwarding “for as long as at least one ICANN-accredited registrar also continues to offer these services at the retail level”. It says several registrars plan to keep offering them. Both original requests will be withdrawn and replaced with new ones that end only new third-level registrations and new forwarding addresses.
Who pushed back
Fraser’s post thanks a long list of people: registrants who filed formal requests for reconsideration, others who sent letters of support, lawyers who took the case to ICANN, and one person who flew to Bali to make the argument to ICANN in person. Whether that pushback caused the change, Verisign’s letter does not say. Fraser has no doubt.
What “indefinitely” means here
Fraser writes that existing domains and email redirects “will remain indefinitely”. The letter is more careful. It ties the promise to at least one registrar still selling the service, and the new requests still have to go through ICANN. New third-level registrations are on their way out either way. For the people who already hold one, the address stays as long as someone is willing to sell it.
Back to the garden
The third post ended with two pieces of advice: read and comment when ICANN opens applications for input, and register at the second level rather than under someone else’s name. This turn adds a footnote to both. The rules alone did not protect the third-level registrants, because ICANN had approved the deletion in July. After the approval came the pushback from the people who held the names, and after the pushback a different plan.
This time, the people holding the names had a say.