Is it me or does everyone and their mother have a gTLD these days?
I would not take any company that uses a gTLD serious at all.
In a few years, it will probably the standard domain for big corps. iphone.apple, macbook.apple, etc. It looks weird now (or an intranet address at best), but once people get used to it, it will be recognisable as a domain just as any.com is now.
Not to mention, an explosion of TLDs for reselling (.futbol .enterprise etc) means people will just equate . on billboards etc with a domain.
ICANN: Hey, has anyone noticed that our wallets aren't
very heavy?
Google: We have a bucketload of money just laying around
that will fill your wallets, and wouldn't mind
our own gTLD. It'd be cute.
ICANN: You had us at 'bucketload of money'
Google isn't going to abandon their perfectly good domains.
Good thing icann just increased the available domain-space from "limited" to "unlimited" then. That sounds good for almost everyone, or at least icann.
If anything this might be step back in the right direction. Whereas I cannot tell anything about the nature or origin of a site based on the fact that it has a .net or .ly tld, I will be able to tell something about nature and origin of a site if it has a .google or .apple tld.
Wow. Such nostalgia.
More generally, as part of ICANN's gTLD approval process, if the gTLD being applied for is a trademark, then it can't go to anyone else besides the trademark holder. So there's actually a lot more assurances that you are dealing with who you expect to be dealing with with gTLDs versus random domain names on .com.