> I had history with Verisign and did not trust them.
I don't know what that history is, but did it really make a tld used by only 22k people more appealing?
> I had history with Verisign and did not trust them.
I don't know what that history is, but did it really make a tld used by only 22k people more appealing?
That's 22k people with third level domains like first.last.name. There are close to 100,000 second level last.name registrations, which are not going anywhere.
https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/name-2014-03-03-en
According to Wikipedia, "Verisign was the outsourced operator for .name since the .name launch in 2002". That makes the reasoning yet more puzzling.
They ran the backend services, but didn't set the policies (until they acquired the operator in 2008-2009)