On 19 December 2011 11:32, John R. Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
Back in the 1990s, it seemed plausible that people might use TLDs as a diretory. Fifteen years later, we know that people use Google as an index, and that most users are only vaguely aware that there are TLDs other than .COM and perhaps their local ccTLD. There was a hypothesis that new TLDs would provide meaningful competition to .COM. Now we know that's not true either, and saying "competition" a thousand more times won't make it so.
Well said. It is conveniently glossed over that new gTLDs have negligible effect adding competition applicable to end users. For them, the choice of domain is made by their preferred content providers (as registrants), they themselves have no choice and the issue of competition between TLDs is moot. The end-user choice -- and the related competition and quite the hotbed of innovation -- is not really between TLDs, but rather whether to use domain names at all instead of history-aware search engines, mobile apps, URL shorteners and many other means to connect them to their preferred content sources and service providers. It looks like the IDN ccTLDs are working more or less as they're supposed
to, but asking for new ASCII TLDs or new generic TLDs is just stubbornness in the face of reality.
It's not stubbornness. There is too much money out there available from registry investors, speculators and defensive registrations to allow this to evolve naturally. - Evan