The biggest change in DNS since Dot-Com

Just allow me to free up a few assets so I can afford to apply :)

Doesn't the whole concept of having to pay large amounts of money just to apply to maybe register a new TLD feel a little bit against some of the original ideas behind the "World Wide Web"?

You do know what the cost of the prevous round of tlds was > £1,000,000.

Btw I used to be one of the owners of .coop :-)

This seems like kind of a big deal. I'm surprised I'm only hearing of this now.

I guess the price creates a big enough barrier for most people?

Food for thought; prepare for all e-mail validation regular expressions to start failing `johnny@friskies.lolcats`. As if the regular expression already wasn't complicated enough: http://ex-parrot.com/~pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html

The biggest winners from this are search engines. URLs will just be ignored in future.

maintaining an up-to-date TLD list must be problematic from now on.

Why would you do that yourself? IANA publish one http://data.iana.org/TLD/tlds-alpha-by-domain.txt