Remember, you opened this box.

Don't take it personally. The whole domain industry is full of it, and that even worse it deeply believes its own bullshit.

I witnessed first hand the hopelessness and futility of those who believed that a TLD could define, sustain or create a community. There have been plenty of aspiring TLD-based community builders such Thomas and his "connecting.nyc" scheme, or Annalisa whose involvement in dot-green hit a wall in 2013 when -- as I'd feared in my own comments at the time -- it inevitably became a greenwashing tool.

A decade ago I myself was waist-deep in the doomed Applicant Support program, which limited participation to community TLD applications and ended up so terrified of gaming that it had qualifications that nobody could meet. I should have known better at the time but learned a great deal from the experience. The loudest lesson was that the whole TLD-as-community mantra is utter balderdash, pitifully pursued by dreamers and mercilessly exploited by the industry. Dot-music, dot-gay, dot-pro and the 2009 "CityTLD Constituency" project are other examples of registry schemes that promised the stars but delivered (at best) meterorites. And as we have seen from too close a distance, even the one TLD that we *thought* was a community -- dot-org -- was not safe from attempted manipulation by a conspiracy between former ICANN staff, investors and ISOC.

In other words, we've heard this song before; so please spare us a refrain, regardless of its musical style or its new iteration of fairy dust.