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They are making some serious money from this scheme. Google alone has spent $18.6 million on registration fees of its 101 different new gTLD.

Fucking up the whole internet for only a few hundred million dollars seems really incredibly short-sighted to me.

Only ICANN really had the choice, and the UN declared the US government can't sponsor them anymore (and of course the UN is not replacing the funds)

So ...

How are they "fucking up the whole internet"? People are taking their aesthetically sensibilities way too seriously.

They pretty much have - but you need to apply for it, and be able to manage the work of a TLD registrar.

It looks like there's at least some administration involved in the assignment. See the notes section of this table: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_doma...

For instance, if you register for .wed and take longer than 2 years to get married, both your fiance AND your registrar will be angry with you.

DNS I'd imagine. Traditionally, the root DNS servers points to TLD servers. It doesn't really make sense for every possible string to be a TLD.

Isn't that pretty much what they're doing? Are there strings that somebody wanted to pay to register but ICANN declined?