Comment by Meleagris
16 hours ago
Ok. But why would anyone buy a third level domain when they could have bought the second level? It’s a strange thing.
Were the third level domains cheaper?
Me personally, it wouldn’t even occur to me to register a third level directly, because why bother when you can have the second level and do whatever you want with it.
Super strange.
Third-level registration was how it was designed. Second-level was added later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.name
Buying a third level also came with some email functionality, so if you owned first.last.name, you would be able to forward emails from first@last.name to you. If you have firstlast.name, you need something like first@firstlast.name
It was a bit odd, but well intentioned.