"Not so sure about Amazon buying .amazon, because it also is the name of a rainforest in South America, and .apple could be a problem for growers and lovers of the fruit."
Seems like I covered the Apple case.
Seems like I covered the Apple case.
"the problem. And it extends to words and concepts that weren't created by anyone living today. Sex, love, laughter, babies, books, songs, cars, poetry, etc. These things shouldn't be TLDs, they're too important, too basic to life. Not the kinds of things any company, for crying out loud, should be able to claim to own."
Why is it such a tragedy if poetry is a TLD but poetry.com is no problem? Why is unthinkable that a company could own .poetry but no problem if the same company owns poetry.com?
Maybe those domains shouldn't have been issued, but they were. And that's why you want to deal with these things before you get an installed base, not after.
But you are right we should deal with these things before there is a large user base. So let's sort it out now and come up with a solid framework for what alphanumeric strings are acceptable. What are the rules? Which alpha-numeric strings are too important to let a company own?
My name is Doug, can I register .doogie? Can I register .poetree? Is .oybt acceptable, even if it is rot13(blog)?
The difference is in the democracy of it all. Acquiring domain names is a very democratic process even if you take into account squatting and other shenanigans. Scrounge up ten bucks and a web connection and it's yours. TLDs aren't even close. It's a total plutocracy and ICANN seems totally unapologetic about it while the companies snatching them up look ridiculous when they put a line in their proposal about how their ownership of some random word as a TLD is in our, the users, best interest.
How can anyone overlook that? It's practically beating us over the head, taunting us.
"Acquiring domain names is a very democratic process even if you take into account squatting and other shenanigans."
Since when?
But more importantly how am I harmed by the new TLDs?