Tragedy of the commons.

Plus greed on the part of ICANN. You can only sell one .google TLD, but there are thousands of relevant words in the dictionary for anyone with a deep enough coin purse.

Greed by its own board members, too. One of them, after seeing through opening up the gTLD market... quit to start a company that filed for over a hundred TLDs.

What will this mean for Chrome users who use the address bar also as a search bar for their favorite search engine. If apple, for example, owns 'http://apple, what would happen when I type 'apple' in the search bar? What if I'm actually searching for pictures of apples? Scary stuff.

Are there any TLDs that are valid hostnames on their own? Also, will this become true for the new ones? I certainly hope not.

I don't see why they won't be valid hostnames as long as they resolve to an IP address. "localhost" is a valid hostname, too. A lot of existing software, of course, will complain that it's not a valid FQDN.

Do you know of any that work that way though? I'm just intrigued if any exist. The only example I can think of where a generic suffix resolves separately on its own too is https://gov.uk but that's still a second level domain.

UPDATE: Aha, "to" has an A record. It doesn't respond to an HTTP request for me but it does exist at least.

UPDATE2: OK, there are quite a lot: http://ydal.de/a-records-on-top-level-domains/ .. http://dk/ goes to the .dk registry.

I'm not sure if any will be valid on their own just yet, but I really wouldn't surprise me if it was the "next step" in TLD/hostname branding.

The ICANN administration is notorious for its motives. While a public organization, many of its decisions are clearly to benefit their own and are clearly not in the public benefit.

Couldn't you say the same for .com domains? Is it fair that one company gets to own search.com?

I don't think so. TLDs are, by convention, categorical in a way that search.com isn't. It's problematic for a company to own a category in that way.

Heh. You want to see generic, check out Verisign's applications. '.com' in a whole bunch of scripts other than Latin - they've applied for the Cyrillic script 'ком', the Hebrew script 'קוֹם', and what I assume is the same thing in a bunch of languages I don't read.

On the other hand, I'm sure they'll make them publicly available - for the right price.

There's also كوم which is 'com' in Arabic.

I'm not sure how the gTLD are supposed to work technically, but it seems to me that VeriSign made a mistake when registering the Hebrew '.com': Their version uses the Holam diacritic (the dot over the middle letter), which is not used in every-day Hebrew (it's mostly used to teach reading and to differentiate between different words with the same spelling, when such a thing might cause confusion). In any case, most computer users in Israel don't even know how to add diacritic marks, so I don't see anyone typing such an address in their browser.

Yep, I'm guessing whoever wrote the Verisign application didn't know about כתיב מלא. Whoops.

Generic gTLDs should remain free for all to use. Of course, this makes it hard for some companies whose names are generic but to me app.apple is easy enough to remember. Amazon.books? Perfect. Google.books? Works well, too. From a user/customer point of view, making generic gTLDs non-purchasable makes perfect sense.

Who cares. This is just another way to fleece idiots.

How are those non-standard .cc addresses working out for everyone.

I've always thought the entire TLD taxonomy was an ugly, unsystematic hack, but I can't actually think of a better way to do it.

Were any alternative methods of allocating TLDs ever proposed?

Thought the same. most of those are ridiculous...

The fact that apple will literally control http://apple/ is more scary.

This thing could have its benefits. If Apple grabbed .icloud, say, then people could have yourname.icloud, or something like that.

Yes, and .icloud makes a lot of sense, because it's company or product specific. .cloud makes NO sense because neither Apple nor Amazon nor any other company owns the idea of clouds.

I agree with your point, but your specific example is flawed as Apple did not apply for .app.