opening up TLDs for sale seems like a (somewhat) logical way to expand the available namespace for domains. We have zillions of hosts, why require them to conform to one of a few random categories.
Certainly, I have issues with how TLDs are allocated and controlled, but that doesn't mean that the general idea of allowing essentially arbitrary top level domains the same the way we do with second level domains is inherently a bad thing.
> opening up TLDs for sale seems like a (somewhat) logical way to expand the available namespace for domains.
Some would say the new gTLDs have failed to increase the supply of useful domain names, because the only people who use the likes of .info and .biz are scammers, and that bad reputation scares users off.
It was also well known from the start that the gTLD program was going to extract a lot of rent from domain owners - that the likes of Volvo would end up paying $180k for the .volvo TLD and $300 for volvo.sucks and so on.
Some people see the fact gTLDs had none of the benefits and all of the costs, and yet ICANN keeps on issuing them, as a sign that it was never about the benefits to begin with - that it was about shaking people down for rent all along.
They tlds are basically scams. When they are introduced they claim to have a rollout schedule that allows the general public to register names but the good names are effectively reserved.
I tried to buy california.beer on the first day .beer was available to the public. It was always listed as unregistered but if I tried to buy it strange errors occurred.
After the time period where they were required to allow registrations for a set price, california.beer was listed for $1000+.
It ossifies the namespace. As in, you can't have a name that is both reasonable and can coexist with the current DNS model.
Any of .onion, .bit, .coin, .eth, .crypto, .zil, can expect the .dev treatment, or, in time there won't be many nice available one for future developments. Similar issue might be with things like .ipfs, which don't resolve in the usual sense, but could cause confusion if there was an ICANN .ipfs domain.
Some domain trader will come and say those aren't "real" names, and you are supposed to rent them from ICANN, but that seems like a protection racket.
The main issue is that it breaks expectations. Someone missing a space after a period now potentially typed in a syntactically valid URL (I see this pretty commonly in texts where the messaging app decides its a link), it breaks the UX of searching in browsers URL/Omni-bar and now you have to include a question mark for lots of cases where you haven't for multiple decades.
>opening up TLDs for sale seems like a (somewhat) logical way to expand the available namespace for domains.
It does the reverse. There is only one root zone. Before the root was a free-for-all there were hundreds of different areas to set up shop in the namespace. Now there are exactly two: 1. have fuckloads of money to piss away on a vanity TLD, or 2. use someone else's TLD.
Every TLD has the same possibility space as the root zone, but we only get one root zone. There are no do-overs. Careful creation of TLDs allowed mistakes of previous TLDs models to not be repeated, experimentation with different implementations, business models or namespace allocation strategies. Now there's exactly one.
We used to have headroom at the top to sidestep "hope an existing brand isn't squatting the name" and try things like country code TLDs, .arpa, and .int. Or tack resolution experiment onto the side with .local or .onion.
If you wanted to do any of those now, it's impossible because the namespace has been reduced. Go back to options 1 and 2.
opening up TLDs for sale seems like a (somewhat) logical way to expand the available namespace for domains. We have zillions of hosts, why require them to conform to one of a few random categories.
Certainly, I have issues with how TLDs are allocated and controlled, but that doesn't mean that the general idea of allowing essentially arbitrary top level domains the same the way we do with second level domains is inherently a bad thing.