What missed my point was your discussion of this issue from the perspective of the destination. I only care about the first part of that statement.

I want ALAC to focus on the origin, the non-registrant end user. I don't care -- and neither should ALAC -- about whatever goes on further up the food chain.

How does the end-user get to their destination? Less and less by typed-in domain names, according to my research, which was the original reason for the post.

How can the end-user trust that the domain will resolve properly and won't contain abusive content? (the discussion of what constitutes "abuse" is beyond this part of the discussion, but is ultimately very relevant)

How can the user ensure that the domains they use will still be around in a few months or years if they bookmark it?

These are the issues that matter to me, and what I want ICANN to address. What happens at the other end of the connection is someone else's business.

And I eagerly encourage them. But I'm not holding my breath.

IIRC, once upon a time Amazon wanted to turn .BOOK into a hierarchical card catalogue of sorts. The registrars and resellers all bleated their opposition and it never came to pass, though I supported it, thinking it could have been quite useful from an end-user PoV. I also remember a car company wanting to reserve its TLD for people who bought their cars; I don't remember if that came to pass or not.

If the expansion was for new models, even (maybe especially) B2B ones that aren't public-facing, that would be fantastic. But I suspect the round will be dominated by the usual gangs of speculators and wannabe marketing influencers. I don't frankly care if they all blow their financial brains out, except for the potential impact on end-users if the public-facing TLDs they create go away. As I said, I'm with you that TLDs should cost $1M; the excess revenue could be used to fund better tackling of abuse and REAL internet governance at IETF or W3C. Applying the current Disney approach of "yield over volume" to ICANN would suit me fine. Perhaps lower the fee for innovative models as an incentive.

The inertial forces against TLD model innovation are strong. I would truly look forward to new approaches -- again, especially if they enhanced end-users' Internet experience. They could even rekindle interest in typed domains and reverse the trend I identified.

A pile of new category names, IDNs and .xyz clones won't do that.

- Evan