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Comment by po | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain to me any benefit that the ICANN decision to rollout new TLDs has provided? I am sure one exists but I cannot think of any. Trying to be open minded about this but I really don't understand why more geeky types weren't more anti-new-TLD when it was being proposed.

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I would say there was an overwhelming anti-new-TLD groundswell in the tech community! ICANN took note of this, raised a very balanced and diplomatic middle finger, and proceeded to move ahead with its plan.

AFAICS the nominal reason was that TLDs like .com were/are getting crowded and country based one's (e.g. .io) were being mis-used as generic TLDs

So as a reaction to that ICANN allow new generic TLDs to be registered. In and of itself, I don't think that's a bad idea. However the $180,000 registration fee seems a bit like a money grab, the lack of restrictions on the allowed names (e.g. .sucks) and the land-grabbing by large companies on a wide range of generic names (mainly from what I've seen Google and Amazon) have made the process a bit of a mess.

Money grab? Protection racket.

ICANN gets a nice influx of cash.

How about a million dollars to sweeten the deal?

"IPC also points out a peculiar change to the standard new TLD contract that’s in the .Sucks agreement with ICANN. It includes an additional fee for Vox Populi with $100,000 upfront and $1 for each additional transaction for up to 900,000 transactions. It’s very odd that a registry would agree to pay this additional amount to ICANN."

http://domainnamewire.com/2015/03/27/ipc-asks-icann-to-halt-...

Were people not opposed? I was opposed, but as far as I know there wasn't a vote about it.

Except everyone was opposed?

On the other hand, ICANN made a whole lot of money out of it, so that's something.

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