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Back in 1993, if you typed the URL http://apple/ into Mosaic anywhere on the University of Vermont network, you would get a page about apple orchards. Of course, this was just UVM's DNS.

Somebody reigsters the gTLD "apple", and sets up his website at http://apple/ [apple] and his email somebody@apple

There is no A or MX record for "com", "net","org","us","uk","info","museum","biz","mobi"... I'm going to say that none of them work that way. If anyone thought they would work that way, that's their own damn fault.

The real reason ICANN is doing all applications simultaneously, is so that the folks in the later batches won't have an opportunity to ask for their money back when they realize that a gTLD is completely worthless.

Here's what's going to happen: Somebody reigsters the gTLD "apple", and sets up his website at http://apple/ and his email somebody@apple. Then he finds out he gets no web traffic, because people don't type "http://" into their browsers. They just type "apple" and get the top search engine hit (apple.com) instead. Also, much of his incoming email never gets through, because most email software doesn't recognize "somebody@apple" as a valid email addresss.

Will browser makers update their browsers to go to gTLD's instead of top search results? I don't think so. Their users would hate them for it, so they'd need a financial incentive to do so. Maybe they could charge gTLD owner's another $100k to be on a whitelist. That would generate a lot of money for browser development.

That's funny. If I enter in Firefox http://apple/ then the browser puts me to http://apple.com./ Also for http://slashdot/ and for others. Maybe Firefox already knows about the new ICANN stuff?

It goes beyond that... it's also about recognition.

When I see "blablabla.com" I'm pretty sure that's a website. When toplevel domains are fully customizable and some companies will presumably start using http://microsoft/ or http://apple/ ... recognition will be gone, which is very annoying and slightly confusing. Most annoying for me personally (and many others I gather) will be I can no longer use the top bar for both searching and entering a webaddress. If I enter one word right now, it searches for it and if I enter a word+".com" (or similar) it goes to the web page. How will it be able to know once we go "keyword"-ing our TLDs? (Without either having a current list of ALL TLD's (which can become a huge list) or looking it up online (which introduces lag, especially on mobiles)?

But it was bound to happen I guess... ICANN wasn't going to ignore this huge amount of money that they can make from this just because it might make sense.

Domain names aren't trademarks, they're ways to address a node on a network.

Companies are all internet-enabled now, and they want anyone looking for their trademark via search engine or URL to find them.

Basically, "Domains aren't trademarks"; stopped working when beancounters everywhere decided they wanted them to be. And now they're on the verge of making the ultimadum "It's too unfriendly to have to have that .COM .NET or .ORG in there; take it off; just make us http://apple/ or what have you "

>>Is how many orders of "herbal viagra" do you need to sell to pull in $185,000 to register .v1agra (or other such clever alternate spelling) to run your spamming operation with no registrar oversight ever again?

That would be awesome. I'd setup my local BIND servers to think they are the TLD for .v1agra and point it all to 127.0.0.1. I would then block any e-mail coming form @*.v1agra.

But the majority of spammers wouldn't do this because of how easy it is to block.

What I can see is a security nightmare. In todays mind set, I will register .c0m Or .C0M with a zero. .0rg aka .0RG.

Now how hard is it going to be to spot the different between http://ebay.com/ and http://ebay.c0m/ for the average joe?

Mindset of a few years down the road. Now common are domains like http://checking.uowbank/ So as a hacker I register U0WBANK replacing the o with a zero. Will your font let you tell the difference in my phishing e-mail?

I'm not against the idea of more TLDs, but I can see how it will complicate security. Of course, if you allow any TLD then why not drop the entire TLD idea alltogether?

Let one register not EBAY.COM but EBAY. So it's HTTP://eBay You could basically do that with these opened up TLDs, but only those with $185k to burn will have something so nice. So we will end up with http://microsoft/ and http://apple/ but poor guys like me will still have .com at the end.

My $.0185

If the .org or .co.uk part is essentially arbitrary (I have .org, .com and .net all pointing at the same site just so that someone else doesn't grab them), then wouldn't it make way more sense to just leave it out?

http://slashdot/
http://google/
http://apple/
http://microsoft/
etc..