This is only a safe bet until it isn't. If she starts asking about your life insurance and hiding her phone from your view, you will know it isn't a safe bet anymore.

Verisign could create a work-around by defining a format at the second level - such as ml--2-4-johnsmith.name in which the first number is the number of levels, then there are n - 1 numbers to identify the number of characters at this level, so in this case it would map to john.smith.name at the registry level. There are only about 5 or 6 existing second level domains that are too long for that to work and they could be remapped as, say, ml--id-1 through to ml--id-6.

Since the double dash at that position is reserved for registries (the registry should reject a registration with double dash at that position outside of its own defined uses and xn-- for punycode domains) , this would allow Verisign to facilitate those domains being managed (or even created afresh as long as they are not too long) as if they were second level domains while continuing the third level domain service, avoiding the registrar implementation problem.

They won't do it though because Verisign has never been known for the customer-focus or corporate responsibility.