It's not as if I'm going to be able to buy microsoft -dot- <whatever> and expect to be able to keep it.

And if you can't buy domain names that someone already has under dot-com (or another TLD) then it seems that this is just another way for GoDaddy /et al/ to make a pretty penny parking domains with Google ads and/or "pharmaceutical" sites and filling the world's DNS servers with even more junk entries. Not to mention the extended phishing possibilities of non-ASCII characters in URLs.

>it should leave decisions over whether to allow controversial domain extensions to national governments, "such as adjudication of morality, public order and community objections"<

No it bloody well shouldn't! Gubmint should absolutely not have any say whatsoever in adjudication of morality - that's called censorship and most up-to-date constitutions have prohibitions against it. Sheez... the quality of politicians these days...

You are right on target! New TLD's are created only to sell the equivalent domain names to the person who already holds the .com. When they added .biz and .info and all the other DNS 2.0 TLD's I was inundated with offers to "buy them quick - before my competitors did." I resisted on principle. The only people who want these new domains are spammers, scammers and the sellers themselves.

"raising questions once again over the organization's independence from political interests in Washington."

Raising questions?? These ICANN -people are the sock puppets for Bushco and that's very clear to everybody who doesn't live in Bushland or it's European sibling, UK.

It's not all their fault, though. They happen to live in a country where disagreement with government leads to Guantanamo without trial, secretly.