It appears that Bill Woodcock <woody@pch.net> said:
ICANN’s going to open another round of TLD applications, and I expect a lot of companies to go into that with their eyes more open than last time, knowing why they’re doing it. It’s not about brand protection, it’s about disintermediating the root of trust and giving yourself a solid foundation for your security architecture.
I take your point, but I also observe ICANN's list of abandoned vanity TLDs which now has 134 entries, companies that paid the fee, went all the way through the application process, paid to get their TLD set up and signed and put in the root, probably costing them on the order of $500K in all. Then later they decided the TLDs are worthless and mailed the keys back to ICANN. Here's the 134 who have abandoned so far, with more every few months: https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/gtld-registry-agreement-termination-20... Also, getting your own TLD doesn't necessarily make your risks less, it just makes them different. You now have a direct relationship with the registry back end provider that you have to not screw up, and due to ICANN's rules, there is a registrar between you and your registry for each of your names, e.g. payme.hsbc is registered through Comlaude. I do not see why this would be any better than a .COM registered through CSC.* I will be interested to see how the next round goes. As seen from anyone outside the ICANN bubble who can do simple arithmetic, the current round has been an utter failure for everyone other than ICANN and the people who sucked money out of the process (which includes me, but not so much I particularly want to do it again.) R's, John * - I have argued with CSC about updates to the IANA domains and found it is nearly impossible to get them to change anything even when you follow the process they set up. I would expect it to be even harder to get them to make changes outside of the process. Their whole business model is not to annoy their large company clients most of which also use them for Delaware corporate paperwork.