[ShadowAce]

[Carriage Hill]

_...

[chrisser]

Mason noted that .COM has over 100 million registrations, which is a lot of names.

"The downside is if you want a domain name specific to what you're doing -- your business, product, family, cause, project, whatever -- you're really unlikely to find it," Mason said. " These TLDs will be different because they allow variety and specificity."

How many of those registrations are actually used? For better or worse, the current domain model allows speculators to buy up huge blocks of domain names purely so they can auction them off later. The same thing will happen with any new TLDs that are added.

Of course, most businesses starting out don't have the cash to pay for these useful names that are taken off the table, so they have to come up with more and more esoteric and convoluted names while the useful names go unused.

I don't know what the solution is, but creating more blocks of names that are just going to be bought up and removed from circulation anyway, doesn't seem to be a big help.

[Tanniker Smith]

There should be a domain for the people of Middle Earth, *.ent.
They'll get lots of traffic from people like me who mistype .net all the time.

[dayglored]

IMO, this is nothing but a scam. While well-intentioned (perhaps), what this REALLY means is that thousands of companies now have to purchase and maintain hundreds more domains of the form my_company.every_new_tld simply to keep a competitor from doing so. The income from this maneuver enriches the registrars, which is why they have supported it.

It is nothing but thinly veiled extortion, with an excuse that satisfies the masses who don't have any knowledge of why TLDs existed in the first place.

*SIGH*

[muir_redwoods]

ICANN’s monopoly is at risk and they may lose it by August this year. The “invitation” to spend between $100K and a million to protect your brand from squatters is largely seen as a last minute fund raising effort by ICANN. This mostly means nothing.

[Hotlanta Mike]

Barry Soetoro

Home - by BigFurHat - June 11, 2012 - 07:30 America/New_York - 7 Comments

Have you ever typed in BarrySoetoro.com just to see what happens?

Try it.

http://iowntheworld.com/blog/?p=137195

[Paine in the Neck]

These top level domains are a racket. Suppose you have company MyCompany. You want a website so you acquire MyCompany.com. Immediately, you are confronted with MyCompany.net, MyCompany.tv, etc, etc, as potential harmers of your reputation. To protect yourself you must acquire all these other sites as well. Besides multiplying the revenues of the organizations controlling the top level domains by the number of newly created domains, it is sometimes a lengthy and expensive proposition to collect all the MyCompany URLs accross the ever-expanding set of domains. There must be a better way to organize internet domains that is more in the interests of the users than in the interests of the controllers.