ICANN Pushes Ahead With New TLDs
allthingsd.com
allthingsd.com
As for the new ones, I'm more curious than anything, as there are two huge unknowns here. First, people/companies have to buy the domains. Second, the public at large has to accept them. We've already seen TLDs both generally catch on and generally fail (anyone remember the dot-mobi craze?). I'm not convinced that companies are going to have to spend lots of money to squat "mycompany.apple" or "mycompany.hotels" or whatever just to "protect their brand." I mean, companies don't generally worry (AFAIK) about other people's subdomains now, and if new TLDs catch on people may start to view the 'middle' name in the same way. Or maybe not. It's just a big unknown right now.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_doma...
Single label names always resolve first on the local domain. Except when they don't. This isn't currently a problem because no admin in their right mind would name their servers "com", "org", or "net". It's a tacit convention that's now being broken. I can think of a few security problems this creates, lord knows how many we haven't thought of yet.
ICANN is selling names in a namespace they don't control.
As Dan Geer puts it, "ICANN has devolved into nothing but a protection racket." http://geer.tinho.net/ieee/ieee.sp.geer.1107b.pdf
http://www.icann.org./ returns a blank page.
No one uses the trailing dot except for very DNS-specific admin stuff.
Sounds like a great plan.
I'm always amazed at the large numbers of people that criticize ICANN's work and the very small number that contribute to it.
vast tracts of the namespace
The thing about (even) the current TLD system is that there is a variety of namespaces and each one by itself is effectively unlimited. Sure, everybody wants to have a .com but when it comes down to it, it really doesn't matter except for brand name purposes. People who need to publish and read information can use something else (that most "rogue" of websites Wikileaks proved this).
On the other hand, moving all the expensive commercial brand stuff to the top level (as ICANN aims to do) really does create a single tract of namespace under monopoly control.
I don't understand your point about competition creating a monopoly unless you are referring to ICANN"s "powers". It is an artifact of the community. Show up and participate in the monopoly if you are concerned about how it wields its influence and directs its policy.