there's little demand for TLDs amongst those I meet, and I've never ever heard a call for TLDs from anyone outside the ICANN community. This is not to say we don't need them or that they wouldn't provide a good deal of benefit to society.
That's OK, I'll say it. Every single sTLD has been a complete failure by any reasonable measure. Compare. for example, the several million co-ops world-wide and the 300,000 registrations the .COOP application predicted, to the reality of 6400 registrations, and no growth in recent years. I have nothing against co-ops, or the airline or travel industries, or the personnel business, or doctors/lawyers/accountants, or residents of Catalonia or Asia, or museums, but it's abundantly clear that the members of all those groups have voted with their feet and stayed away from the domains that putatively exist for them. The only new domains that have a lot of registrations are .BIZ and .INFO, and that's because they're utterly generic and .INFO had a long running sale at 1/3 the price of the competition. Similarly, I see no reason to think that the residents of New York or Berlin, or the music business, or the ecology community, or any of the other groups alleged to benefit from TLDs we've heard will apply in the new TLD process want them, either. I suppose that if IBM applies for .IBM, they really want it, but it's hard to see any public benefit in creating a process of interest only to rich famous brands. So speaking both for myself and CAUCE, any delay in the new TLD process is no problem. 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