I'm still having a hard time seeing what everyone is getting worked up about.
Maybe it's not that bad. The eventual result is instead of having a billion .COM SLDs, there are a billion TLDs: all eggs in one basket, the root zone -- there will be so many gTLD servers, no DNS resolver can cache the gTLD server lookups, so almost every DNS query will now involve an additional request to the root, instead of (usually) a request to a TLD server (where in the past the TLD servers' IP would still be cached for most lookups). Ultimately that is a 1/3 increase in number of DNS requests, say to lookup www.example.com if there wasn't a cache hit. In that case, I would expect the increase in traffic seen by root servers to be massive. Possible technical ramifications that haven't been considered with the proper weight, and ICANN rushing ahead towards implementation in 2009 without having provided opportunity for internet & ops community input before developing such drastic plans? Massive further sell-out of the root zone (a public resource) for profit? Further commercialization of the DNS? Potentially giving some registrants advantageous treatment at the TLD level, which has usually been available to registrants on more equal terms?? [access to TLDs merely first-come, first-served] Vanity TLD space may make ".COM" seem boring. Visitors will expect names like "MYSITE.SHOES", and consider other sites like myshoestore1234.com "not-legitimate" or "not secure" The lucky organization who won the ICANN auction and got to run the SHOES TLD may price subdomains at $10000 minimum for a 1-year registration (annual auction-based renewal/registration in case of requests to register X.TLD by multiple entities) and registrants under vanity TLD to sign non-compete agreements and other pernicious EULAs and contracts of adhesion merely to be able to put up their web site, As a subdomain of what _LOOKS_ like a generic name. And, of course, http://shoes/ reserved for the TLD registrant's billion-$ shoe store, with DNS registration a side-business (outsourced to some DNS registrar using some "domain SLD resale" service). The possibilities that vanity TLD registry opens are more insidious than it was for someone to bag a good second-level domain.
Sure, nefarious use of say .local could cause a few problems but this is
I'd be more concerned about nefarious use of a TLD like ".DLL", ".EXE", ".TXT" Or other domains that look like filenames. Seeing as a certain popular operating system confounds local file access via Explorer with internet access... You may think "abcd.png" is an image on your computer... but if you type that into your address, er, location bar, it may be a website too! ".local" seems like a pretty good TLD name to be registered, compared to others, even many that have been established or proposed in the past, more general than ".city" (unincorporated areas with some sort of name also can use .local) short, general and simple (just like a gTLD should be), not highly-specific and elaborate like ".museum" -- -J