When I got it, it was only allowed to register subdomains in the form of firstname.lastname.name and I even had to provide my ID card to be able to register the domain name. The deal then was that I could use DNS zone of the subdomain, and in addition got an email redirection from firstname@lastname.name to whatever email address I would choose.
A few years after that, VeriSign suddenly stopped supporting the email redirection feature, with not even a single warning sent to customers like me. From one day to another, I lost the main email address I used to communicate and for all of my online accounts. It was a mess to deal with this.
To this day, I was never able to get hold of my lastname.name, to be able to restore my email address. Even though I'm the only one in the world using a subdomain of it. The only solution that has ever been suggested to me by VeriSign customer support would be to let it expire, and hope that no squatting bots get it before me so once the grace period expires, I can try to register the first-level domain. But that would mean several weeks where my website would be down, and all that with the uncertainty of actually being able to actually get it back.