The time-lock acts as a way to ensure names aren't revealed the moment channels are registered which would create a race condition where attackers could hijack names by registering them on other servers.
The channel name is something like time_lock(name_meta_data, server_details) -> deterministic channel name based on the parameters passed to the function (output is unique per server.) Just like if you used a hash function you get the same output for the same input. Since the time lock needs a certain amount of compute to elapse (and a certain amount of time to do it) -- it allows time for the name owner to register the appropriate channels on other servers.
The channel name is something like time_lock(name_meta_data, server_details) -> deterministic channel name based on the parameters passed to the function (output is unique per server.) Just like if you used a hash function you get the same output for the same input. Since the time lock needs a certain amount of compute to elapse (and a certain amount of time to do it) -- it allows time for the name owner to register the appropriate channels on other servers.