I’ve lived by a good rule for most of my life. “Never build on rented land”. It’s why, while Goosed has social media accounts, we’ll never give up this – the news site. We, to a certain degree, own this space. As long as I remember to pay the hosting and domain name bills. Now I have had domains lapse before. Never dramatically, just the boring way, a card expired, a renewal notice went to an inbox I don’t check anymore, and one morning a site I’d half forgotten about was down. That’s always been my own fault, and I’ve never really blamed the registrar for it. I run my own home server, I built my own password manager after 1Password’s pricing kept creeping up year after year, and I’ve spent a fair amount of time telling people to get off Gmail and onto an email address on a domain they control. Then I read a story this month that made me stop and question that advice.
Verisign, the company behind the .name domain, is switching off an entire class of registration and deleting roughly 22,000 addresses that people paid for, in some cases years into the future. Nobody missed a renewal. Nobody breached a policy. The registration category they signed up for simply stopped existing. One of the people affected is Neil Fraser, the Google engineer behind the Blockly programming tool and the syncing engine behind collaborative editing in Google Docs. He registered his personal address in this format nearly 25 years ago and has it paid through 2040, but his registrar has told him it stops working around February 2027 – hopefully that link keeps working.
That’s a strange and fairly rare situation, and I don’t want to overstate how many people it touches. But it’s a useful, slightly uncomfortable case study for a piece of advice I give a lot, which is that owning your own domain and your own email is worth doing. It still is. This is just the exception that advice never mentions, and it’s worth understanding before you act on it.
What’s actually changing, and what isn’t
Every normal domain you’d register, a .ie, a .com, a .co.uk, is what’s called a second-level registration, your chosen name sits directly under the top-level domain. The .name domain has always allowed something unusual alongside that, a third-level registration, where the registry itself issued addresses in the format firstname.surname.name. Verisign has told ICANN it’s discontinuing that third-level format entirely, citing declining use and limited support from registrars. ICANN approved the change and confirmed it in a letter to Verisign dated 28 July 2026. Around 22,000 of these addresses exist, though Verisign’s own filing says most of them are no longer in active use, and it will terminate all of them regardless, along with the email forwarding service that came bundled with them.
Ordinary second-level .name domains, the kind that look like example.name, aren’t affected. If your domain looks like yourbusiness.ie or yourname.com, none of this touches you directly. The story matters here because of what it reveals about the ground underneath domain ownership generally, not because there’s an .ie equivalent coming.
The same approval letter also spells out how registrants are meant to find out about this. Verisign’s obligation is to notify the registrars that sell third-level .name addresses, giving them a minimum of 90 days’ notice plus a reminder at least 30 days before the cutoff. Neither ICANN nor Verisign has any direct duty to notify individual registrants, that’s left entirely to the registrar to pass on. If your registrar is slow, understaffed, or simply doesn’t forward the notice properly, you find out your address is gone rather than that it was going.
The decision hasn’t gone entirely unchallenged either. A registrant has filed a formal request asking ICANN to reconsider its approval, and while ICANN’s own accountability committee has recommended denying it, the request hadn’t reached a final board decision at the time of writing. Worth knowing this isn’t settled quite as cleanly as Verisign’s paperwork suggests.
The bit nobody’s fully confirmed yet
Once these third-level names are deleted, the second-level name sitting above them is expected to become available to register again. Some of the people affected have raised an alarming follow-on risk, that whoever registers the newly freed second-level name could recreate the exact third-level address that used to belong to someone else, and with it, start receiving whatever password reset emails and account recovery attempts still point at that old address. Verisign hasn’t published exactly how or when that reallocation will happen, so treat the specifics as unconfirmed rather than settled. But the shape of the risk is real enough that anyone still relying on a legacy email address tied to an old domain arrangement should be thinking about where their account recovery actually points, not just whether their inbox still works today.
This is probably one of the most under documented risks of owning your own domain.
How much of anything digital do you really own
This is the question that struck with me longer than the .name story itself. How much of a domain do you really own? Less than you’d think, and it turns out that’s true even of the stuff you host yourself. I like owning things. That’s the whole reason I run a home server instead of paying for cloud storage forever, and it’s the reason I got fed up with 1Password’s subscription creeping up every year and built my own password manager instead.
Owning it felt like the responsible move, right up until I accidentally deleted every password in it. I got them back, thankfully, but it was a genuinely stupid few hours, and it taught me something the .name story just confirmed from a different direction. Self-hosting and self-owning trade one set of risks for another.
You stop depending on a company’s pricing decisions or its roadmap, and you start depending entirely on your own backups and your own discipline. Neither one is free of risk. A domain is the same trade in miniature. You’re not renting space on someone else’s platform the way you are with Gmail, but you’re still relying on a registry and a registrar to keep honouring an agreement, and this month is proof that agreement can end on terms you never signed up to.
Why owning your domain is still the right call
None of that changes my advice, it just adds a caveat to it. Gmail has its own version of this problem, and it’s arguably worse, because there’s no contract at all behind a free account, and an automated suspension with no appeal takes your whole identity with it overnight.
The advantage of a normal domain is that your email provider becomes a swappable layer sitting on top of something you control, rather than being the thing itself. If your registrar or your host lets you down, you point the same domain somewhere else and your address doesn’t change. That’s a genuinely different position to be in. The people caught out by the .name change were never quite in that position, because the level above their address was never really theirs to begin with. It’s a reminder to know exactly what you’re holding, not a reason to give up on holding it.
The way most domains really die
For almost everyone reading this, the realistic risk was never a registry deciding to delete an entire category of address. It’s far more boring than that. A card on file expires. A renewal reminder goes to an address nobody checks anymore. A web agency set itself up as the registrant years ago and nobody’s spoken to them since. A former employee still has the login. I’ve lost a domain to exactly this kind of carelessness myself, and the honest lesson wasn’t “the internet is unfair”, it was “check who’s named as the registrant on your own domain, and make sure it’s you or your business, not whoever built your website a few years back.” The .ie registry keeps a running deleted domain list of names that lapsed this way and became available again, and it’s worth a glance if you want a sense of how often this happens to people who never saw it coming.
The rule I follow now
The rule I’ve settled on is that nothing digital exists unless it lives in three places. If an email address matters to you, whatever’s in it needs to be backed up somewhere you control, not just sitting on a server you’re trusting to still exist in ten years. You need an actual backup of that content, and you need at least one other way back into your accounts if that email address ever stops working, whether that’s a second email address or a phone number set up as a recovery method. I keep both routes live on my important accounts, and I treat two-factor authentication as non-negotiable rather than an optional extra, because the accounts worth protecting are exactly the ones someone else would want to break into if your domain ever changed hands without your say-so.
None of this is a reason to stay on Gmail, and it’s not a reason to distrust every registrar either. It’s a reason to be precise about what you’re protecting when you move your email onto your own domain. You gain control over your provider, and that’s real and worth having. You don’t gain a guarantee, because nobody selling you a domain is offering one. ICANN’s own explanation of what registering a domain means is closer to a renewable lease than a deed of ownership. So own your domain, back up what matters, keep a second way into your accounts, and turn on two-factor authentication everywhere it’s offered. That’s the version of owning your own email that survives a story like this one.
