ICANN approves plan to vastly expand top-level domains
Found on Ars Technica on Sunday, 19 June 2011
ICANN apparently recognized that there's a continued interest in expanding gTLDs, and set about creating a mechanism to handle requests as they come in, rather than to consider them in batches on an ad-hoc basis.
Still, the FAQ also makes it clear that grabbing a gTLD won't be an exercise in casual vanity. Simply getting your application processed will cost $185,000 and, should it be approved, you'll end up being responsible for managing it.
As if there aren't any more important problems to solve, like the tight control and abuse of .com domain names by the US government. ICANN should first become truly independant before thinking about how to squeeze more money out of the DNS system. Not to mention that soon there will be domains like pay.pal, e.bay, g.mail, face.book, master.card or visa.card; and all that after users finally learned to pay a little attention to the links they click.