The only people who are in favor of this are those who stand to benefit: ICANN (who likes elaborate meetings in exotic places), registries, back-end providers, advisors (lawyers), and registrars (hello larrys). Did I miss anyone?
Any end users who think this will benefit them are clueless. As this blog post says most people have not a clue what the above parties are up to.
There are basically two main camps among the applicants: domainers looking to capitalize on type-in navigation and overpriced sales of key terms, and companies looking to protect their trademarks. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
ICANN is a non-profit organization. They are tax-free. But they treat themselves to perks many for-profit companies only dream about; they live a lavish lifestyle (they just raised 300 million for essentially nothing!) for an organization that is supposed to be acting in the public interest.
It is one heck of a racket.
There will be non-ICANN DNS with some new features emerging out of this fiasco. You can bet on that. ICANN has gotten far too greedy. The conflicts of interest are blatent and insulting.
Any end users who think this will benefit them are clueless. As this blog post says most people have not a clue what the above parties are up to.
There are basically two main camps among the applicants: domainers looking to capitalize on type-in navigation and overpriced sales of key terms, and companies looking to protect their trademarks. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
ICANN is a non-profit organization. They are tax-free. But they treat themselves to perks many for-profit companies only dream about; they live a lavish lifestyle (they just raised 300 million for essentially nothing!) for an organization that is supposed to be acting in the public interest.
It is one heck of a racket.
There will be non-ICANN DNS with some new features emerging out of this fiasco. You can bet on that. ICANN has gotten far too greedy. The conflicts of interest are blatent and insulting.