ICANN is wrong

Right, like Sun, Netscape, Digital Equipment Corporation, Silicon Graphics, GM, Lehman Brothers, etc.

If any industry should know that "financial wherewithall" != stability, it's the technology industry.

The difference is in the democracy of it all. Acquiring domain names is a very democratic process even if you take into account squatting and other shenanigans. Scrounge up ten bucks and a web connection and it's yours. TLDs aren't even close. It's a total plutocracy and ICANN seems totally unapologetic about it while the companies snatching them up look ridiculous when they put a line in their proposal about how their ownership of some random word as a TLD is in our, the users, best interest.

How can anyone overlook that? It's practically beating us over the head, taunting us.

"Acquiring domain names is a very democratic process even if you take into account squatting and other shenanigans."

Since when?

But more importantly how am I harmed by the new TLDs?

Many do not understand this point. Unlike domain names, which are ambiguous, trademarks have a couple of dimensions that allow ambiguity to be greatly reduced: class and geographical scope.

I have actually developed a solution for the domain name ambiguity problem. It respects all trademark owners, not just the ones who pay ICANN the most. (Aside from squatters, registrars and registries, ICANN takes a small percentage of every defensive registration for every trademark in existence. Now ICANN has upped the ante to well over $200K.)

Of course, it is a simple solution and I doubt anyone is interested. The way things are structured, with ICANN encouraging (by ignoring) conflict and promoting a "winner take all" approach to naming, is beneficial to those who are gaming the system. And it is quite easy to exploit ambiguity, "winner take all", and to game this system.

The root really isn't as important as people are led to believe. It's the large registries that are more important, such as .com. If a user wants to access names in a fringe tld registry, whatever it may be, he can tune his DNS to allow that. If the content on sites in that tld is that good, he'll make the effort to adjust his DNS settings. It is not prohibitively difficuly by any means.

ICANN wants to play the registry game, after years of watching domaining and repurposed cctld's making millions for others. The root is all they have. So, like a registry, they want to open the root zone to domainers, which will also force the hand of trademark holders who need to register defensively. ICANN knows exactly how this all works, and this is a calculated move to enrich insiders.

The person at ICANN who was supposedly running the program just resigned. A replacement was just announced.

I'm always surprised when people defend ICANN and their root. The root is not so important. If you have your system tuned to access the .com/.net servers, you can access the majority of the internet. Add .org and the cctld's and you have almost 99%. The root zone is not very dynamic. You can run your own copy. It rarely changes. But the root is all ICANN has with respect to naming (IANA is the real jewel of their crown, though the US Dept of Commerce may take that away if ICANN is not careful). ICANN wants to play the domain name game. If this whole new gtld proposal does not make you see the level of double dealing going on at ICANN, I'm not sure what will.

ICANN's role is overstated. The addresses of the tld servers we all use rarely change. Any user could manage their own copy of the root. The root really just serves to prime DNS caches. It is not something that should get queried very often.