Any open requirements should come as a maximum price limit for creating new additional entries under the TLD.
Hopefully they'll also include non-discriminatory pricing (so that the owner of a TLD won't be able to raise the rent once a specific domain becomes popular in traffic/sales).
I don't understand why people are so quick to assume companies are buying these up for nefarious reasons or to harm consumers.
Because, historically speaking, that's what big faceless corporations usually create monopolies for.
It's not that they're against consumers, it's that they are for themselves. This rarely aligns with what's best for consumers on a small scale.
so I can get a .shop extension too after Google gets the one and only?
there are a lot of reasons i don't like that ICANN is doing this but fear that these companies are going to employ abusive monopolistic tactics is not one of them. and i think ICANN is likely to just ignore such complaints, because they don't make any sense. this is the opposite of a monopoly and these companies would be dumb not to share the extensions.
for $1 million plus in costs. You are confusing the extension with a domain name. The point is not to have ONE company own and control an extension (like .com) and all the domains in it. ICAAN should control them and then allow people and corps to register domains within that extension.
One company does control .com right now, and .net. Their name is VeriSign. Just like VeriSign administers those, Google is going to administer .shop.
If they choose the latter, just use any one of the hundreds of other extensions that will be available.
I hate that ICANN is doing this - but not because of some theoretical power it technically gives Google.
That is, given that the domain format requires a minimum of two parts (the TLD and one other), ownership of entire swaths of possibilities/permutations can be locked down via complete ownership of one TLD.
This has already happened. Afilias controls .info. Public Interest Registry controls .org. (Afilias actually runs the backend operations of .org for Public Interest Registry.)
I operate a registrar and I pay money to both of them. When we call support (rare) the same people take the calls for both TLD's.
I was around when this happened and .info was being floated and passed on an opportunity to invest in it.
Charleston Road Registry intends to operate the proposed gTLD as a closed registry with Google as the sole registrar and registrant. The goal of the proposed gTLD is to allow Google and its Network to manage the domain name space for their application offerings. The proposed gTLD will provide Google and its Network with the ability to customize domain and website name application offerings to signal to the general population of Internet users that .app websites are indeed managed by Google. The specialization goal of the proposed gTLD is to extend the Google brand and reputation to each .app second-level domain. This specialization provides a mechanism by which Google and its Network can easily link and manage their applications and related services. This specialization makes it clear to Internet users that this is the authoritative and designated space where they can find Google’s and its Network’s applications offered in association with the Google brand and accessible via differentiated and streamlined web addresses.