The .name registry does serve a useful purpose... personal sites are one category
that isn't covered very well by the current TLDs. I'm not a commercial company
or a nonprofit organization or a network provider, so .com, .org, and .net don't
suit my personal site very well. .name makes sense for this. And I've
read the rules for its launch, and they're actually pretty fair; trademark owners
don't get free rein at fencing off the namespace as they do in .info -- they can
make "defensive registrations", but they can be successfully challenged (on a "loser
pays" system) by somebody whose actual personal name is in the protected space.
So, while anyone named John Smith may have some difficulty getting his own name,
most other people should be able to. So this is a new TLD that actually adds
something to the namespace not presently available, and may actually work in a way
that lets people get the names they want without too much hassle. It doesn't afford
opportunity for speculators, though, since you're only supposed to register your
own name, not somebody else's. So I expect the Make Money Fast crowd, who thinks
the only purpose of domain names is to be a goldmine for whoever can manage to grab
them, to object to it. Normal people, though, have much to gain from it.
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