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The owner of yyy.name is the .name registry. That's just how they work. The intention was that people register first.last.name, and that multiple people could register under the same last.name.

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Then it sounds like the .name registry is also in the business of selling subdomains, i.e. they're the owner of yyy.name. In other words, it's not possible for Namecheap to rent you xxx.yyy.name, because to do that they'd have to be the owner of yyy.name, and they're not.

Sounds like the tech support agent and supervisor got it basically right.

They're not really subdomains. If you try to do a whois against e.g. smith.name you'll see it's not a registerable domain. Only the second level can be registered, xxxx.smith.name. Similarly if you had xxxx.co.uk, you own a domain because co.uk isn't registerable. The only quirk about .name is that common names can't be registered at the top level, but uncommon ones can.

> it's not possible for Namecheap to rent you xxx.yyy.name

I'm sure they could if they wanted to. Gandi will happily do it for $15/year. I can only assume they've decided it's not worth their time to do so.

Early on (nearly 20 years ago) it was possible to register a yyy.name by itself. For example, I own the domain for my last name.

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