I've been digging through the zone file for .name, specifically looking at third-level registrations of actual personal names, and... a tremendous majority of these (I'd estimate 85-90%) are
* Japanese names
* with Tucows as registrar
* with Yahoo! Japan as reseller and nameservers ns#.yahoodomains.jp
* and with no records besides the NS records themselves
* but which have nonetheless been continually renewed for years.
What exactly is going on? What is Yahoo! doing with all these names?
Wait, it's not that they have no dns records, ns1.yahoodomains.jp is explicitly refusing to answer. Maybe region-locked? Curiouser and curiouser
Of 24803 registered third-level domain names in the .name tld, 15079 (~61%) of these have ns01.yahoodomains.jp and ns02.yahoodomains.jp given as their nameservers, but said servers refuse all record requests for these domains (even when coming from a VPN exit point in Japan).
I believe that the Japanese use the Internet in significantly different ways from what I'm used to.
@publius
That could well be so but I would still like to understand how it is that they are using it in this case.
Whois information being as heavily redacted as it is these days, I can't really tell if these names are all owned by some Yahoo!-subsidiary holding company or all by different people or what