...cash wins.

Good to see that money is still everything.

Still, lets do some elementary maths, I bid 100,000,000 Flanian Pobble Beads for the right to manage .$$$. So I must now charge my customers 1,000,000 for their domain. I'll now approach Barklies and demand 1,000,000 for Barklies.$$$.

I think we could be looking at many future amusing articles on this subject....

SPL/T.COM goes bust, nobody wants $$$ domains.....

Barklies tells SPL/T to FoaD...

By the way who gets the money from the auctions?

I take it that .cum was to close to .com then ?

...I think I'll cater for the fetish market:

.feet

.toes

.ankle

.gimp

.sado

Not forgetting our single-sex friends:

.gay

.lesbian

The FBI will be registering .kiddieporn to catch those stupid enough to search for it!

(Yes, I am bored at work whilst I wait for several hundred gig of data to rsync from a dying server.)

"must respect morality and public order"

But whose morality and public order ?? The Japanese will be quite happy with what the rest of the world call kiddie porn (I know it's not strictly true), but not pubic hair. The US will be quite happy for guns and pictures of gun crime, but heaven forbid porn should feature. The UK wont want anything, unless they can make a database and track everyone using it.

You get the idea . . .

ICAAN is California, USA not-for-profit public-benefit corporation, under the auspices of our Department of Commerce

It can basicly expand it's staff, payrates and office space, have more meetings, travel all over the world ... basicly creating a self-substaining

bureaucracy similar to how our not-for-profit<sic> governments work us. Perhaps the $0.22 fee they get per domain

Besides, the applicant / registrar has to have the equipment.$$$ and the knowhow.$$$ to run a TLD and dnsroot.$$$

.biz was a good idea, still has potencial, but I doubt any new TLDs with the *possible* exception of .XXX will be worth the .$$$ invested ....info looked good, but it's worthless.$$$

what would be much more useful, make "&" a legal character in domain names .. all blogs could be on .&&&

So who is going to run the root dns servers for all of these zones? I'm sure that you will need to be an accredited registrar for this, so we will soon be blessed with .godaddy .1and1 .netsol, .blog, etc.

If it is cheap enough, their will be so many tld's that it will wreak havoc on internal domains, active directory, and corporate email.

They should be renamed ICANNOT, for their pathetic do-nothing attitude to dealing with their spammer-friendly registrars, especially the Chinese ones, who register millions of spammer domains, breaking both their own and ICANN's T & C, and do nothing to suspend them despite thousands of complaints.

ICANN is probably still buried in its bureaucratic quagmire and busy (?) writing a discussion paper on formulating a working party to bring together a committee to think about appointing a group to manage a new section to appoint a third-party to oversee...

Meanwhile the spammers continue to fill our in-boxes full of crap... thanks ICANN!

Wow, here we go with ICANN playing socialists. I like to think of the internet as a level playing field where alot of people with nothing started up a website for a small amount of money (ebay) and grew them to success. What is ICANN really saying here? Maybe we need to get rid of ICANN and put in a responsible party that won't socialize the internet. Those that have have because they went out and risked everything to make. The have-nots for the most part, will have nothing regardless of what is handed to them.

Fake addresses will be much more difficult to detect.

Addresses will be harder to remember.

Some of those registrars will go bust, or just give up running the TLD - what happens to all their addresses then?