A day or so ago I ran across John Levine’s “What are TLDs Good For?” and wanted to share it with you. In preparing this post I discovered that exactly a year ago today I posted “The TLD Mint” — at least that made choosing an image and title easier, ha.
Anyway, Levine says
Yesterday I said that the original motivations for adding new TLDs were to break VeriSign’s monopoly on .COM, and to use domain names as directories. Competitive registrars broke the monopoly more effectively than any new domains, and the new domains that tried to be directories have failed. So what could a new TLD do?
Levine lists several reasons for the new TLDs (among them “get rich quick”, the point I’ve ranted about before), concluding with
The only unambigous beneficiary of new TLDs is ICANN, whose cash flow will increase by $185,000 per application, and all of the consultants they’ve hired to do the evaluations because ICANN’s many highly paid staff evidently can’t do it themselves.
A commenter discusses how this also leads to the creation of a “Super League” and worldwide private monopolies.
For more on TLDs, check out CircleID’s topic Top-Level Domains News, Opinions and Blogs.
image: LionKimbro, Domain name space.svg, Wikimedia Commons
