Honestly, fuck Verisign.

They want to discontinue this because it's not especially popular or profitable. I take this to mean that they can't get enough money to support the administrative and developmental overhead.

Now, it's true that there's only ~100k people using first.last.name type domains, and managing those and their special rules is a time and testing suck for developers and administrators. And likewise the business of getting things done requires offices and other resources. On the other hand, domain name registration is, when you get down to it, a matter of administering a database and keeping things like the DNS in sync with it. It's technically inelegant and annoying, and no doubt a potential source of security problems (isn't everything?), but it's not actually a difficult or dangerous job, and the financial overhead seems like a negligible fraction of their revenue.

I get that this is an administrative headache. But administrative problems often do not require administrative solutions, in the sense that the administrative 'solution' is to generate some paperwork declaring the the problems outweigh the benefits and the impact on others doesn't matter and can be ignored. There's a sense throughout the document of people who took on a responsibility just wanting to wash their hands of it without any consideration for those who will be impacted. This is an ongoing cultural antipattern in Silicon Valley and the tech industry in general. There's an air of dishonesty to Verisign's claims 'we talked to a few people verbally and everyone's cool with it, therefore you should approve it because there's no opposition that matters.'

istm the best way to resolve this is via Coasean bargaining, that is Verisign pays people to go along with the shutdown, using some sort of objective formula and getting buy-in from a supermajority of registrants. For example they could offer 5 years of free firstname-lastname.com (or .name) hosting and guaranteeing domain forwarding for 2 years, or let people handle it themselves in return for $1000 or whatever. To be sure, some people might argue that their loss is much greater because they've built a big brand around their .name domain, but I think it's probably better to get broad acceptance for a blanket solution rather than turn it into a fight for the most $ that will inevitable end up in protracted arbitration or litigation, costing tens or hundreds of times more than buying people out.