Bill Nash wrote:
Off the top of my head, I can see some high dollar fist fights breaking out for .sex, .porn, .games, .hotel, etc. It'll be like the .alt tree on usenet for people with money. There may also be an actual fist fight over TLDs like .irc, .leet, .goatse, and .krad. Maybe not .krad.
Say I am a pastry chef, and I pay $40 per year for "pastry.com", I got it because I signed up early and now cherish my domain name. I am a small business. But now, some rich guy can come in and bid for .pastry I have no money to participate in this endeavour, and no intentions of running my own TLD. All I can do is voice an objection, but if the other guy is also involved in food, he is likely to convince ICANN's comittees that it is a legitimate request. Then you end up with pastry.com being the original small business, and .pastry being anything else. This will lead to a lot of confusion. Yeah, for guys with deep pockets like yahoo, google, banks, GE and oil companies, they won't even notice a dent in their wallets when they register their own .TLD . For small businesses who worked early to get THEY name attached to a .com, they now see the value of their domain name evaporate because anyone else can now use a confusing variation of it and you just don't have the money to bid/auction against them I didn't have the time to carefully read all the documents that were pointed to here, but are there any requirements for a TLD to operate a true WHOIS server so people can easily verify the indetity of some site using a new .TLD ? (aka: to enable people to see that pastry.com is the original shop, while www.pastry is some impostor who started a pastry shop that is unrelated to pastry.com)