That's 22k people with third level domains like first.last.name. There are close to 100,000 second level last.name registrations, which are not going anywhere.

https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/name-2014-03-03-en

According to Wikipedia, "Verisign was the outsourced operator for .name since the .name launch in 2002". That makes the reasoning yet more puzzling.