Comment by TZubiri

Is there any resource you can point towards understanding this? I'm well versed on DNS itself, so it can be a technical document.

What I understand would be the following:

1- Verisign manages the TLD registry for .name (and others), which includes managing the authoritative DNS servers (as pointed to by the .name NS and A records on the root DNS servers), 2- as well as for updating the NS records of .name records it is authoritative at the request of registrars (like, say GoDaddy), which act on behalf of domain owners. 3- one or some of the domain owners, for example for fraser.name, acted as a registry themselves managing authoritative DNS servers for NS records of .fraser.name domains, these third level DNS servers being pointed to by the name. NS records.

4- Upon registration of a .name domain, verisign charged a fee, (in the case of .coms this is around 10$ currently I believe, not sure how much they charge), and ICANN charges a much lesser fee (like 20 cents).

5- Upon registration of a .fraser.name domain, the fraser.name domain owner charged a fee, and they kept the totality of that fee (potentially paying a fee to ICANN, but definitely not to verisign.)

6- Verisign issues this request, requesting registrars of second level domains (domain.tld) like GoDaddy, to stop selling third level domains of this TLD (domain.2ld.tld).

This is my understanding of the situation, and in that case, verisign was not billing for the domain. This might (a bit cynically) provide a commercial motivation for the actions of verisign.

It's worth noting that this is not at all a weird or shady practice, multi-level domains are the very ethos of the domain system, it's built for that, I'm not saying any domain is obligated to do that on the basis that it can, but it's not some esoteric illegal activity, it's normal.