I'm not sure I agree. Outside of domain sellers and would-be speculators who will be denied their transactions, will anyone in the outside world -- who will never know of the missed "opportunity" -- even care? After all, hundreds of alternative TLDs already exist, and my instincts suggest that gastronomic-minded registrants would still prefer a dot-com name first if they could get it....

Personally, I would go so far as to suggest that such closed TLDs could even be a good thing. Among a sea of conventional TLDs used for essentially identical functions, a closed generic -- unbound from the shackles of having to sell through registrars -- could actually bring some real innovation to the DNS. Using subdomains as a catalog or archiving index, with a consistent interface throughout the TLD, could be an interesting experiment. And you won't likely find scammers and spammers under a closed gTLD so it might actually gain more public trust than conventional "open" ones....

I'm curious to know the opinion of others. Personally, in this case I am happy to support the status quo and wish Scripps Networks luck in doing something out of the ordinary. And I would oppose any efforts to get At-Large to take a stand against this opportunity.

Thank you.