and will your distinguished organ be purchasing any?

.paris, because she'll wonder why all her sites are in french

The whole idea of adding more TLDs is incredibly stupid.

"Hmm, domain name land grabs have always proven to be chaotic, expensive and time-consuming. Let's do it again."

A .london TLD? WTF?

According to Wikipedia (OK, I know) there's 2 Londons in each of Alabama and Ohio, one each in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Indiana, Kentucky, Minnesota, Missouri, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Illinois. There's also Londons in Canada, Belize, Equatorial Guinea, Finland, and Nigeria. Oh, yes, and UK.

And they want to do this for all city names?

And they want to have random non-heirarchical names for anyone with $200K?

Pure greed-driven madness!

The Kentucky casino domain name grab has already proved the US is not to be trusted with this stuff. Now they want to FU the TLDs!

Enough already. Pass control of TLDs to the UN. Make the USians use the .us TLD and then they can simply firewall anything that doesn't have it. Put them in the Unsullied Sandbox of America where they belong.

[/rant]

Can I get .cotton or .matrix please?

...typical-icann.ripoff

And the porn industry.

Pairs? try www.onenightinparis

How to turn something reasonably logical that works into chaos that will cause complete confusion. This is greed driven, not need driven.

....this is going to end it tears, by the bucketful !!

if the $200K is purely to cover the $20M cost of implementation then once there have been 100 new TLDs registered, they'll back of the fee then?

Didn't think so.

What would happen if someone registered .1 ?

Suddenly the loopback stops looping back ...

It isn't being used right now, but it might be worth a fortune one day.

Seriously, though, will there be a ban on two- and three-letter TLDs, on the grounds that at some point in the future a new country might come along and would then *need* that domain as its country-code domain? Perhaps .vla might be a test case?

This is *such* an ill-though-out venture that it surely represents the last nail in ICANNs coffin, banged in by their own fair hand.

It's all about whom or what got there first!

What do people in the UK call their vacuum cleaners? Yep, it's the first company who managed to make it big. You don't say get the vacuum cleaner out, you shout "Grab the Hoover!".

So by that token when your average Joe talks about a website he thinks "www" and ".com" on the end, with whatever brand is in between. The number of arguments that have come about when I have asked my old man to go to site X only to find that he has automatically assumed WWW.xyz.COM.

No one will remember www.overpriced.tat.market or useless.IT.news.site, will they?

X -> WWW.xyz.COM?

you couldv'e caused a meltdown if you asked him to go to XYZ!

$200,000 so I can set up .xxx please?

It isn't likely, fortunately, that a modest number of vanity TLDs will break anything too badly. The main impact seems likely to be how many fat-fingered typing errors will cause bogus queries to the root servers, looking for .londin or whatever.

If people want to give .bogon registrars free money for nonsense, why worry? It's just another form of income redistribution, something we so badly need in these desperate times...

...Sounds like a good choice. Visit our web site at www.dot.slash/dot/.