On 15 November 2016 at 23:28, <bzs@theworld.com> wrote:

I don't think policy should be driven on a guess at the likelihood
that a gTLD might be desirable to end-users or not.

Why not? So far gTLDs have been given out based in guesses that they'd be financially stable. There was no market analysis before the expansion round to deminstrate either demand or viability, so it's all been driven on guesswork so far.

There is an interest that the world of non-domain-buyers and non-domain-sellers has in the landscape of the DNS. Arguably that is EXACTLY what the bylaws mandate At-Large to advance and advise.

Also, I don't know of any of these .BRAND gTLDs which are doing
anything out in the wild other than creating SLDs for their products
or marketing campaigns such as next100.bmw. Which is fine but that's
not what's being discussed here vis a vis .FOOD.

We don't know. What we do know is that the open ones, with VERY few exceptions (ie, dot-bank and maybe dot-ngo) have a singular business model, mostly based on tonnage of domains sold.

Has any closed TLD actually offered registration to end users?

They have to be careful how they do it, let they run afoul of the registrar lobby, er, constituency. Personally, I'm hoping that Google walks this path because it's consistent with how it's disrupted other fields such as email and productivity apps.

There're a lot of RSN speculation or puff pieces on why this is going

to be so great.

Don't know about great; right now the bar is low enough that I'll settle for interesting or unusual. I do hope that a few of them break out with innovative ideas of how to use (and monetize) bits of the DNS. Dot-food, as being one potential branch of a large media company that already works in print, broadcast and streaming, has a legitimate potential for innovation. Whether and how Scripps takes advantage of that is anyone's guess.

But whatever they pick, and whether it succeeds or not, it will be more innovative than yet one more goldrush and sunrise and pool of speculators.

- Evan