OK, but many people (including myself) had the opposite yet equally obvious intuition that ICANN wouldn't allow closed generic TLDs. It was so obvious to me that I didn't bother to check the rules, so now we're in this situation.
I remember hearing that Canon Corporation was going to buy .canon [1]. And to my mind it was clear: they have no intent of selling .canon subdomains. Canon Corporation has no interest in being a domain registrar. They just didn't want other corporations buying and squatting on .canon. It is a land-grab where the price per plot is $185,000.
Now that it has come to pass, I figure we'll all just adapt to it. I still don't like gTLDs, but so be it. You and I won't be able to get domains in .dev. So be it. I still have my domains in .com like some crazy old-timer.
Buying a generic word and closing it down is a different matter. Tying .blog to only one service is very different than doing it with .blogger. It's a way of saying you won't have any other blog platform than mine, no matter if you're using your self hosted WordPress or one of the many services that compete with Blogger. This would be bad no matter who's going to win the bid for .blog or any other generic word.
It just occurred to me that—for advertising purposes—that would be longer than canon.com. They can't just plop the word "canon" at the bottom of their advertisements. Nobody would understand that to be a URL. So they would have to add the protocol to it:
http://canon
canon.com
www.company.com
company.com
company will be the next natural step. Maybe the step afert that will be naming the company after the domain name (some domains have hyphens in place of spaces in the name of the company now).
If it were not for the huge cost everybody could have its own gTLD. We could end up being surprised that a given company still has the .com suffix. "It's a small one, they don't have money", we'll think.
Precisely, and one of the many reasons gTLDs are so distasteful. It marginalizes smaller businesses that cannot (yet) afford to play with the big-boys who throw around $185,000 as if it's nothing. Prior to this, domain registration was mostly a level playing field of first-come-first-served.
In a world where we often decry regulation that may benefit big business over small business, ICANN pulled this stunt which is egregiously and by design biased toward big business and it was more or less ignored by everyone.
Above, you pointed out that .canon is distinct from .dev because Canon is a trademarked name. Although I understand trademarks have been used to dislodge domain squatters, I believe that's extremely rare. Making a distinction between trademarks and generic terms creates ambiguity. The gray area of deciding between a company named "DEV" wanting to (or more likely feeling they need to) spend $185,000 to protect their identity and a domain registrar wanting to spend $185,000 to sell subdomains in "dev" is yet another reason gTLDs were a bad idea.
We know there are two Apple, the music company and the electronics one. The relationship has not been easy en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer but they have a trademark in their own business space and that's a case contemplated by trademark law. However there can be only .apple gTLD. I'd like to see what's happen has soon as one of the two Apples tries to get it.
This won't be the only case.
Well, in fairness, I would have =)
Going forward, just like it happened with .com domain names, there will be rise of variations. Like .blogs or .blogg etc
What if every IP enabled commercial video monitoring device [1] on the planet were now able to have a functional and durable dynamic DNS service, ostensibly, for what comes next [2]?
[1] http://www.axis.com/products/index.htm [2] http://www.canon.com/news/2015/feb10e.html
It's probably worth lobbying to change the rules for future gTLDs, though.
Their FAQ on the process said they would. And lots of people made noise about it before the application process opened.