in fact the reason i am involved with ICANN is the blooming of a 1000 blooms
We all have our favorite metaphors, although in this case I think the swarming of a thousand blood-sucking insects is more apropos. Look, there's basically two reasons to set up new GTLDs: ICANN said they would in 1998, and some people think they'll make a lot of money. Everything else is unpersuasive. (In particular, the "choice" argument is silly unless someone can explain what's so special about his favorite domain that it will get people to migrate from .COM when nothing else in the past decade has.) Back in 1998 I felt like you did, what the heck, set up some new TLDs. But since then I was surprised to see both how well Verisign persuaded the world that 2LDs are fashion accessories, and that 3rd levels are for losers, and how thoroughly the domain business has been overwhelmed by speculators and squatters and trademark lawyers and a whole lot of crooks. Now the process has gotten so expensive that you can't afford to apply for a new TLD unless you expect to get hundreds of thousands of registrations, just to cover your costs. I think .MUSUEM is cute and harmless, but there will never be another cute little TLD plodding on year after year with a few hundred registrations, because the registry would lose a fortune. If you need vast numbers of registrations, you can't afford to be fussy about who your registrants are, with predictable results, e.g., I know people who use the presence of a .info domain as a spam filter, with a close to zero error rate. So since we are smart people, isn't it time to look at what we've learned in 13 years, and admit that something that might have seemed like a good idea in 1998 isn't such a good idea now? Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly