AI Weekly Malaysia

Verisign proposed and ICANN approved the destruction of all 3rd-level .name domains (e.g., neil.fraser.name), affecting roughly 22,000 registrants. Neil Fraser, who has held his domain for 25 years and paid through 2040, will lose his website, email, and IoT service endpoints in February — and warns that whoever re-registers the 2nd-level domain could hijack accounts tied to those email addresses, commit code under his identity, and seize IoT devices.

Why: If you or your infrastructure depend on a 3rd-level domain under .name, you need to migrate email, DNS, API endpoints, and account recovery addresses before the February cutoff. More broadly, this is a concrete reminder that any email-as-identity or IoT endpoint tied to a domain you don't fully control at the registry level can be weaponized if the registry revokes it — audit which accounts use domain-based email and plan a migration path now.