I have been reading about the new top level domains (those are the .com, .net, .org, .biz, etc) that ICANN unanimously voted in favor of relaxing. Basically the new rules (sometime next year) will let you apply (and pay $100K) for any TDL you want, then wait 6 months for them to approve it. When I first heard this I was really excited because I thought it would open the doors to real innovation and kill the domain hostage industry. The first thing I thought of is an fake email address I used to use when I would pretend an email was sent from my dog...puppypal@hounddog.bone. I like it because I think if dogs made a domain, it wouldn't be .dog, it would be .bone. I was thinking I could go and register hounddog.bone and be done with it. But it turns out, thats not what they had in mind. Instead I would be buying the entire set of all .bone domains to sell and resell. So if you wanted BlackLab.bone, you would have to get it from me. From the examples they give, the only people intresting in this will be companies like IBM who will get .IBM. I'm sure other domains like .mac, .me, .apple, .sun, will be registered. I hope the UN gets to own .earth.
I think the right way to do it would be to go back to my orginal hope and let and orginal first and second level domain get registered. In other words, as drop the idea of a top level domain altogether and let the . and _ just be symbols you can use in a unified domain name. If I want ben.shoemate, fine. It's differnt that shoemate.com and differnt than ben.shoemate.com I think if we went that route, people would drop the .com altogether eventually. Just convert the existing licenses to resell tdl's into licenses to resell . as a symbol domains and lets get on with it.