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[...] The YMBK proposal from the second NSF workshop will almost certainly be the way of the future, and we will see a lot more TLD's and hopefully no one of them will ever be as ugly as .COM is now.

It seems to me that the problem which pushes in the direction of lots of more TLDs is fairly US-specific, as the vast majority of registrants in the COM domain are US companies. Why, then, do you want to pollute the name space used for naming the national domain names with what is essentially a US-originating problem?

If I had my way, we would just have country code TLD's and .INT, and .INT would be restricted as it is now do international treaty orgs. However, the market speaks loudly and those of us who do not listen to it will find ourselves sidelined. I've never been given permission to speak for the IANA, but I'd guess that he sees lots of TLD's as the best way to enable competition among name providers on a level playing field with .COM. (Recall "dot envy" wherein someone will prefer something like MEANINGLESS.COM to MEANINGFUL.something.deeper.)

Is there someone who thinks that trademark problems will be any less of a concern by creating lots of new TLDs -- won't a trade- mark owner be equally interested in protecting his rights in all the new TLDs, especially if the new TLDs are "generic"?

My original proposal was to create enough (tens of thousands) of TLD's such that this sort of small minded protectionist idiocy would be impractical. The IANA did not see things my way on this point, and so I suspect that the larger companies headed by people with the smaller craniums will all decide to register in every TLD. But this will not be a "right" (there are none) and they will have to (a) compete to be "first" and (b) pay for the privilege of their multiplicity. The only downside is that there's no way to make them pay for the _actual_ costs they are imposing on all Internet users, those being confusion, uncertainty, and anger at having 999 things that all mean the same thing except for the 1 thing that looks the same and means something else.