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ICANN To Allow .brandname Top-Level Domains
AndyAndyAndyAndy sends in this excerpt from a Reuters report:
"Brand owners will soon be able to operate their own parts of the Web — such as .apple, .coke or .marlboro — if the biggest shake-up yet in how Internet domains are awarded is approved. After years of preparation and wrangling, ICANN, the body that coordinates Internet names, is expected to approve the move at a special board meeting in Singapore on Monday. ... The move is seen as a big opportunity for brands to gain more control over their online presence and send visitors more directly to parts of their sites — and a danger for those who fail to take advantage."
Why bother with a TLD now? $$$
"As a big brand, you ignore it at your peril," says Theo Hnarakis, chief executive of Australian domain name-registration firm Melbourne IT DBS, which advises companies and other organizations worldwide about how to do business online.
And it only costs $185,000 USD.
Funny, that.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
In fact, I think it just makes it worse.
Not only will there continue to be trademark and other fights over .com, .net and all the rest, there will now be a new level of fighting over a huge rush of TLDs.
Next up, rapid filing for trademarks in small island nations and squatting on TLDs. If I thought of it that easily, so did a thousand scum-bags out there.
F U!
Sincerely,
The Internet
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
There went the Internet
This is a boring sig
This does nothing but muddy the waters further as to what a top level domain is for. The original purpose was to help distinguish the class of site one was dealing with. Branding was already a clear part of the domain. The second part.
This will make web browsers less useful too. As it stands now, if you type apple in your browser bar, it uses a search engine and locates the cloest match to that idea. This would make it ambiguous with a TLD and make it impossible for your browser to easily tell when to search.
My impression is that most folks don't type addresses, they get to sites through google. If I want to go to say Ford's website I open google, type ford, and click on the first link. I usually never type urls unless I have no other way to get there. I don't really need to care if their site is ford.com or cars.ford or whatevever.
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
This seems like it could be really confusing for users being bounced around domains everytime they change pages. Then again the hip browsers are hiding the URL bar by default so wtf do I know anymore...
How do you guys think this would work? What would brands use different domain names for if the extension is the brandname? Would it be for different geographic regions? different pages? different languages?
Now Apple Computers, Apple Corp, and assorted apple grower associations can all go to legal war with each over who has the most right to the one, the only, the singular ".apple" vanity TLD.
Protip: Trademarks don't all share the same namespace, and only have to be unique within a general field of commercial endeavor.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Proliferating the TLDs with all the .com domain names is just plain asinine.
Someone take these morons out back and have them shot, please.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
This is just propping up the already large, uninnovative, and anti-competitive companies like Microsoft and Apple, while leaving smaller companies in the "dirt road" of domains. In the future, we can consumers to look for .BRAND, and blow off anybody with .com/.net/.org/whatever because they didn't pay the small price of $185,000. It's not like the market is unbalanced now or anything, so what could this hurt?
Thank you, ICANN, for putting the big players first.
The potential is huge! It still just seems really strange at this point in time, but guess it will assist in making the web more and more natural in the future.
I'd guess you'll pay a lot more than a .com and then still have to keep the .com to attract traffic.
Wonder what all the rules and regulations are going to be...
This is just plain stupid...but then again, how many ideas birthed from pure greed aren't. I'll believe it's not an act of greed when they only charge $5/year to register these "uber-premium" names. Fat chance of THAT happening.
And when they advertise it's "dangerous" for companies to NOT register ALL relevant TLDs related to their business? I can hear the registrar salesperson now..."What?!?, you mean you don't have yourcompany.com/.net/.org/.info/.biz/.me/.mobi/.us/.biz/(and now) .brandname!?! You MUST register ALL of these NOW or your brand will surely be ruined!"
Yeah, good luck with SEO too...All their damn TLDs won't even fit on the first page of hits.
Other than shiny marketing-speak, what is the practical difference between something like computers.apple.com and computers.apple? I doubt anyone is going to use brandname.brandname URLs, so are we just waving goodbye to the first section of the domain?
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
Thats .Awesome
Just one more step for Corporations to be considered Sovereign Entities. Soon they will be considered the same as a country.
Real SUV's don't have cupholders
It's 5:42 A.M., do you know where your stack pointer is?
...dumbs down the internet for newbies
The internet is damaged by commercial interests. I don't think I'm speaking from nostalgia about 'the good old days' but large commercial interests have only weakened the utility of the internet.
The top level domains should be neutral. The internet is no longer neutral if every company can buy out the namespace.
I envy biological scientists and ecologists with their highly organized binomial classification systems. They're neutral. They organize information how it should be organized.
I reckon we have difficulty classifying and namespacing the internet is because we don't really know what it is. I guarantee that the information architecture will have at least one massive restructuring in our lifetimes. One day it will be called something different, like 'the link' or the 'exchange'. You know the 'omniscient' like information system that you see alien races mention in Star Trek.
Slashdot needs Geekcode | Can anyone recommend any good SCIFI? My tastes: Foundation, Startide Rising, CITY, Ringworld,
ICANN only cares about profit. No surprises there. No matter how many governments and corporations write in to say this idea sucks, they still have complete autonomy and can assure themselves 10 years of awesome fees if they approve this. So it will be approved, without question.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Hmmmmm, until recently, only countries and groups got TLDs. Now, corporations have been elevated to the level of countries.
Yet another sign that the dystopia is upon us.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
So, what happens if my company is called "localhost" and I want the "localhost" tld?
I guess that's a bad idea for a business name ;)
Took them long enough
Can't wait to see which spammer registers free.viagra
Yes,we are aware you are one of many petitioning for .FU, but now you must convince us you are not violating the .FUBU trademark.
Sincerely,
ICANN
I8-D
This is stupid on so many levels. What's next? Religions and cults? Political parties? Hobbies?
Man, who will be the registration authority? How will domains be impacted when/if companies are prohibited from doing business in some location?
Wearing pants should always be optional.
We need IPv6 to be fully supported by everyone, first. More domains and sub-domains means more SSL certificates and exchange servers, etc. Which means more IP addresses.
I know, I know, name based hosting and all that. Unfortunately large corps don't think that way, they think in terms of IP blocks. They will see this as a reason for more IP block thus diminishing the already relatively low number of IPv4 addresses.
So in conclusion, focus on IPv6 first.
My personal opinion on this is it's a stupid gimmick by ICANN to make more money although I do see the value in some very specific use cases. Although I think we might be shooting ourselves in the foot here.
...witness greed. ICANN, get lost. I will restrict all resolvers under my control to the legacy TLDs and CC-TLDs, until a saner organization manages the DNS root.
The root should strictly be reserved for domains where anybody can register subdomains. Getting a TLD should mean that you cannot have domains under that TLD yourself, except for nic.tld. Top level: Registries only!
It seems like almost anyone can register almost any TLD, so I doubt that this would cause the current situation to deteriorate. However, most of the people who are online have been online for over a decade. It is going to be very hard to change people's habits.
Besides, what is the merit of this? Even from a marketing perspective, most people identify "brand.com" as the address to a website so you can just plop that onto any piece of advertising. How would you identify an address in this new scheme? Add "http://" to the front? The people who don't have a clue would have to learn everything all over again. Or maybe "On the web at brand"? Do advertisers really want more verbiage to clutter their message?
As for those in the know, we may care but it won't make a huge difference for us. It will cause problems at first as we have to adjust our habits and networks to account for the new reality, but life will go on.
ICANN has really dropped the ball on new TLDs. Folks like Tim Berners-Lee were explicitly against new top level domains. The W3 even wrote a position paper New Top Level Domains Considered Harmful. They used the examples of .xxx and .mobi, but the reasoning applied to all new TLDs.
ICANN hand-picked economists to examine the costs and benefits, and their own experts could not come up with anything close to definitive as to whether the benefits exceeded the costs. ICANN is supposed to act in the public interest, and only approve policies where the net benefit (i.e. benefits MINUS costs) are positive. ICANN doesn't even know the *sign* (i.e. positive or negative) of this policy change's impact, let alone know the magnitude. Their pathetic reports didn't even attempt to put a monetary figure on the costs vs. the benefits, i.e. are we talking about millions of dollars of benefits, billions, etc? However, many individuals and companies commented in each of the relevant comment periods pointing out how there would be grave consequences, as there would be huge costs associated with such a change. As is typical, ICANN ignored these concerns, attempting to win a war of attrition, to "tire out" opponents.
Fortunately, the US Department of Commerce / NTIA may not renew its contract with ICANN. There is a pending Notice of Inquiry regarding the renewal. I would encourage people to send comments, to voice their concerns about the bad policymaking from ICANN.
ICANN is also about to renew the .NET agreement with VeriSign despite numerous comments in opposition. VeriSign will be allowed to continue to raise prices by 10% per year, despite falling technology costs, and without facing a competitive tender process (which would certainly result in much lower prices for consumers). The US Department of Justice should investigate both ICANN and VeriSign for anti-trust violations, as consumers are being harmed by these no-bid contracts. Toll-free numbers costs less than $1.50 per year at the wholesale level, yet .com/net/org fees are above $7/yr, due to lack of regular competitive tender processes.
Why has ICANN been consistently making decisions against the public interest? The reason is obvious -- it has been captured by the registries and registrars, who only care about selling more and more domain names, even if they are not needed (i.e. "defensive registrations"). They don't care about confusing users or making it harder to navigate the internet.
Doesn't seem to me that this is about the "internet" at all. Its about economics. For the ICANN. Say there are 10,000 international corporations who will pay to immortalize their brand name as a TLD. 10,000 corporations x $185,000 application fee per corporation = $1,850,000,000, or nearly 2 billion USD. Personally, I'd royally screw the internet for $2 billion. It appears ICANN would too.
I guess I can logout now.
I haven't done so, since 1997
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It is normal for a business to register in as many TLDs as they can. Why not change DNS so that TLDs are not even needed?
http://apple seems more user friendly. Of course, this means that there cannot be two johnsmith domains, but who cares?
Dear ICANN,
I'd like to register my company domains, we are Local Domain, Inc. Our leading product is our LocalHost operating system. Please register to us:
localdomain
localhost.localdomain
Thank you,
Root User of Local Domain
This sig intentionally left blank.
At last I can give my waterborne wheat grinding operation the online presence that it deserves! http://marines.mill/
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Mussolini
doesn't it prove that TLDs are no longer a limitation? If the tech exists for arbitrary TLDs why do we even need TLDs (aside from the large cash pile ICANN has).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
ICANN appears to be well on its way to loosing legitimacy. A poster child for what happens when an organization tasked with helping the network is rotted out from the inside out by money.
Fuck these retards. The only acceptable response should be for DNS, network operators and governments to take a stand and disallow queries to arbitrary TLDs. If these new TLDs can't actually be used they will have no value.
This is utterly backwards. What next, .coolpeople or whatnot? We already have a system for this in ccTLDs. It used to work just fine. If you wanted to find the website for the City of Modesto, California, you went to www.ci.modesto.ca.us. Why couldn't businesses do the same? gapjeans.sanfrancisco.ca.us or whatever (which is still lame for anything not local, but if you are a local busienss I could see the desire). This is just a polution of the root zone for the sake of greed. I never thought .museum or .travel should ever have been approved. When have you ever thought to use those domains or seen someone using them? Even if they are using them, it's not the domain they promote, but rather another "we better get it so no one else does" racket. sfmoma.org vs. sfmoma.museum is a great example. But even before that we had everyone jumping on the dot-com bandwagon when there was no need, like www.modestogov.com vs. a perferctly good domain of www.ci.modesto.ca.us, or www.stancounty.com vs. www.co.stanislaus.ca.us. I thought they actually meant to add .brand as a gTLD, and while I still thing this is a bad idea, at least it isn't as bad as letting any idiot marking team with 190K to burn add a domain to the root.
Although I suppose the startup costs will keep a lot of them away. Or have them fighting over abandoned TLD domains...
Still, this seems like a 'clarification' that will only muddy the waters further for most people.
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
Why is ICANN so willing to create new top-level domains now but shot down the .bank extension? I find the sudden "generosity" suspicious.
Proliferating the TLDs with all the .com domain names is just plain asinine.
Someone take these morons out back and have them shot, please.
As a counter-argument, I'd say that TLDs themselves (as they currently stand) are pretty worthless these days.
Consider: If you have a site that's not on ".com", and there's another domain with the same name, except it's in ".com", there's a pretty good chance site visitors will screw up and go to the ".com" on instead. If the same name is in different TLDs and these domains are not run by the same organization, confusion is bound to result.
So one solution would be to go to a fully flat namespace. Ditch TLDs. Do that, and any given name is going to be held by just one organization.
That's pretty much what this change is. TLDs become the new domains, while domain names within traditional TLDs become somewhat devalued. There will be a new "land-grab" for the newly-available TLD space, but given the cost, not many will gobble up TLDs frivolously.
If this catches on, there will be various benefits for those who can afford the premium exposure. "dot-com" will gradually become old-fashion and forgotten. The cost of domain-squatting a TLD will be significantly higher... And the difference between a high-budget site and a low-budget site (presently a matter of hosting quality, software quality, and organizational effort) would be reflected in the site's domain name, as well.
Of course, I'm less pleased with what this change would mean for everybody else - anyone who can't drop $185k on a TLD. Small sites will become increasingly marginalized...
Bow-ties are cool.
When you buy a gTLD, you also are granted all rights for registration within that domain, you essentially become your own little mini-ICANN. Now domains will be registered with essentially zero accountability, that can do whatever they like whenever they like and be accountable to nobody. And once a domain is sold in a new gTLD and becomes a registrar for com/net/org, that registrar will also be above accountability themselves.
At that point, it is game over, the spammers have won. There will be no way to shut down spamming or spamvertised domains. The spammers will be able to register new domains more quickly than we'll be able to detect them (blacklisting goes out the window at that point, too).
But the ICANN guys will have made some nice one-time profits, and that is what they are there for anyways. At least they are happy, and that is the important part.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Fortunately we live in a representative democracy, where I can write to my legislator and object to this action by the agency that governs the internet.
But I'm trying to remember... which level of the government has authority over ICANN? I know it's isn't the state or provincial government, and it isn't the federal or national government.... Surely someone must have authority over them?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Great. Now we can have one stop shopping for protest domains.
riaa.go.fuck.yourself
sony.go.fuck.yourself
mpaa.go.fuck.yourself
Anybody got a spare 185k kicking around?
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
The only thing this will do is give Go Daddy another gimmicky TLD to upsell
Now we can have:
http://slashdot.slashdot/
All these new TLDs should slow down DNS resolution nicely... Well done ICANN, you guys are champs, not sell-outs.
When business influences Internet design to this extent the Internet will ultimately suck bigtime.
Internet 3.0 plz. Encrypted private for professionals, not idiots. Where spyware/adware/malware traffic is not tolerated.
And one more step on the way from DNS to /etc/hosts. Next they'll be complaining that a flat namespace has management and scaling issues.
Area Man constantly mentions he doesn't use the Internet
CHAPEL HILL, NC -- Area resident Jeremiah Cornelius does not use an ISP, a fact he repeatedly points out to friends, family, and coworkersâ"as well as to his mailman, neighborhood convenience-store clerks, and the man who cleans the hallways in his apartment building.
"I, personally, would rather spend my time doing something useful than using the Internet," Cornelius told a random woman Monday at the Suds 'N' Duds Laundromat, noticing the establishment's wall-mounted sign telling customers about free Wifi. "I don't even own a networked computer."
this should have happened 15 years ago. it should be accessible to anyone, same as domain names. it should not be overtly expensive, say 200-500% more than a domain. now get to it, you dirty icann bastards.
...
Who gets to own (and run) the .delta TLD?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Please put me down for the iCANN TLD.
I intend to throw it open to the public, first-come, first-serve.
1: Register ".rules". Cost $185.000
2: Sell cheap domains, i.e. "anonymous-coward.rules". $1 per domain should be enough as I'm sure we can find more than 185.000 people willing to buy a cheap domain.
3: PROFIT!!!
Oh, almost forgot step 0: Register "rules" as a trademark. :-)
I'd like to register with the single Unicode codepoint TLD: U+0008
URLs were never meant to be seen or entered by humans, and yet they are.
"There needs to be a way to get to a server without manually looking up it's IP address in the 'Internet Phonebook' directory."
Thus DNS was born. Now we can change the IP address without losing visitors.
"There needs to be a way to find something on the web without having to remember the unique convoluted DNS entry, especially since you cant put a site description or keywords in the DNS records."
Thus Web-Crawling Search Engines were born, along with page ranking algorithms depending on the keywords or meta data you search for.
"There needs to be a way to get to a specific company, organization, business, band, or trademark website, but I can never remember if it's XXXX.com, XXXX.biz, XXXX.org, XXXX.info -- These TLD's are useless! Besides, phishers can own the other TLD, so making a mistake eg: paypal.biz, or a typo eg: pyapal.com is dangerous. TLD domain owners have to register with multiple TLDs for each misspelling just to prevent people from entering the wrong URL!"
Thus, security experts advise: don't enter the URL. Use a reputable search engine
Type paypal.com into the search box of your web browser. If you make a typo, it will be corrected by your selected search engine. The search engine will also alert you if you click on a dangerous site, and helps to weed out pages that are not relevant. (Oh, some of you thought those people doing that were just morons -- See how foolish your arrogance and ignorance makes your judgments...)
Some browser makers get this, and are creating a combination search / URL bar -- there are privacy issues here though, since you do not want the web browser informing a search service of everywhere you go online (but, they do have other ways of mining this very information).
Hint: The solution isn't more TLDs. .com et al. domains (for reasons mentioned above).
You're just moving the typo problem into the TLD field instead of the defacto standard xxxxx.com field. Sure, requiring a large cost to run a TLD will prevent a lot of malicious uses. However, web services will still be registering multiple
In any event this won't change the fact we're beyond IP addresses and beyond DNS as a way to identify a web page. Typing $companyName into a search box will return the correct page URL along with short descriptions to help you differentiate ambiguous URLs/sites, whereas trying to remember the TLD of a given company is fraught with peril.
"If only there was a registry of valid company names for a given region or even internationally, which also respected trademarks so that two companies don't step on each other -- Thus allowing customers to identify with a brand name, and trust that the establishment under the company name is the same as the other establishments wearing the same name."
Thus Doing Business As (DBA) registrations, Assumed Business Names registries, and trademark offices were born (far earlier than the Web or the Internet, I might add...)
Now -- It would be nice to enter Motorola or Fisher Price, or Johnson & Johnson, and not have to guess how these names map into a URL.
motorola.biz? motorola.com? go-moto.info? motorola.mobile?
fisherprice.com? fisher-price.com? fp.com? fisherprice.toys?
johnsonandjohnson.com? jnj.com? johnson-johnson.com? johnson-and-johnson.health?
Hint: It's the second domain in each list...
The answer is to provide a way to search the Fictitious or Doing Business As name databases -- I know this is possible, because Several of my chosen company names were rejected instantly when my county clerk asked for my assumed business name (She had a search tool!!!)
The way forward would be to integrate these Assumed Company Name databases into our search engines, and allow a Domain to Company Name registration, similar to our Server IP Address to Company Name syst
I guess it's almost time for an alternative DNS.
So now the 'net' will be no better than a deck of cards, tossed from the window of a moving car.
All in the name of the mighty buck.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
this then means i can ban domain.* with exceptions to that wish i want....GO GO GO
This is a dumb idea. I think all of the major internet players need to get together and boycott this movement. This does nothing but confuse internet domain hostnames (ie. confuse users) and is an obvious money grab.
Shame on ICANN
I don't think markets have every like DNS, well URLs really, because it is not simplistic enough for 99% of the masses. maybe 50% of the masses have no trouble with URLs, but still, that is 1/2 the market.
Marketers want something like AOL keywords, IE "Ford" or "Condoms". You type "ford" into the browser (or the whatever application) and you get Ford Motor company's page or what not. They don't want "www" or ".com". Hell, they probably won't even really want "www.apple" or however this will turn out.
products.coke.com would have been so much more complicated than products.coke is that it? Oh wait, it'd have been the same.
So does this mean that coke.com will go back into the pool? Because they won't need it anymore?
Hey, anyone remember when the TLD actually had a meaning and a purpose and some thought behind it?
Anyone but me waiting for TLDs that would make sense? Like Inc., and Ltd. and .corp? You know, for the same reason they exist on paper?
on the .corn TLD. All your sites are redirect to me.
how about a trinomial system, first name a broad range of more neutrally defined categories, such as;
person, city, state, nation, device, primaryschool, university, hospital, company, nonprofit, ngo, military, building, etc. (genus)
and a second name for more specificity, such as:
lisaloebsongwriter, berkeleycalifornia, californiausa, usa, cellphone, johnfkennedyelementarytopeka, harvarduniversity, highlandhospitaloakland, applecomputer, acorn, worldwildlifefund, usmarines, empirestatebuilding, etc (species)
and then numerous third names, essentially subspecies.
but let all the top level names be decided with absolutely no slant towards business interests, only in making sure metadata is acurate. you dont pay different amounts for each one.
mid tier names are the ones a company could claim prior use for, and not have to worry about trolls buying them up.
third tier names could number in the thousands, and maybe this would be a way to generate more income. if apple wants 10,000 names for 10,000 different, simply labeled pages, so be it, they can pay for the convenience of having company.applecomputer.customerservice.
Im just trying to get us beyond these horrible abbrevs. we may just have enough memory and computing power to name pages with more human readable names, dont you think?
Why? Pournelles Iron Law:
"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, vs. union representative who work to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions."
The bureaucrats are building their empires, and no longer care about ICANN's official mission.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Won't this also open the way to a tiered internet?
The document you posted (new top level domains considered harmful) argues more about why TLDs are harmful than why new TLDs are harmful.
TLDs should have not existed in the first place. All that it was required is a unique name per IP, in a flat database. The rest is pure unnecessary bureaucracy.
What would brands use different domain names for if the extension is the brandname? Would it be for different geographic regions? different pages? different languages?
None of the above. The new gTLDs will be used mostly by spammers to get around the pesky registration work that they have to do currently for their domains. No longer will they have to find an unscrupulous registrar in a developing country to buy domains from for their spamvertised web site, now they can just buy their own gTLD for one lump sum and do all their own registration at no additional cost.
Big companies will buy gTLDs just to protect them, spammers will buy them to make our lives miserable. And before you say "I can just blacklist them", recognize that they will do this to register the spamvertised site, which is of course not the domain that the spam itself came from.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
ICANN have been regurgitating this gTLD rubbish for years, trying all different angles to attract interest. So far it has been an epic fail. It must be hard for them to see big companies shelling out measly $30/year for their TLD.
Jeremiah Cornelius is talking to you http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2245866&cid=36480118
I think this is a very good move, in order of commerce this is just great mass-individualisation. Now the techies at ICANN are playing the same trick those commercial dudes have been playing on all of us the last 10yrs. I just say let start introducing first name TLD's soon. The.Marvelous.Mighty.Marcel sounds like a great homepage to me :-)
*puts sarcasm sign up for a second*
I mean, we can not do that, but then it's just a matter of waiting till the first folks are gonna register their firstname as a trademark and via that way register the TLD. Chaos is upon us, I really think so. Tho I think registering the .sex TLD and .porn TLD will be very profitable for those that can afford the startup costs for that right now.
I honestly think we should start some online petition against this.
From ICANN's actual site "If you're wondering whether participation in ICANN's volunteer community is a good idea for you, invest six minutes and hear Mistura Aruna of the Nigerian Communications Commission explain how ICANN helped further her goals."
Thanks to ICANN, I now send over 100,000,000 spam email phishing attempts a DAY! Thanks ICANN!
So it sounds like only trademark owners can purchase a TLD. That seems like the exact mirror opposite of how it should work. Instead of making the purchaser prove that they own the trademark in order to get a TLD, they should prove that they are completely unaffiliated with any of the trademark owners. That basically solves all the problems people are bringing up.
For example: who gets .Apple? Apple music? Apple computers? Apple growers? Apple aficionados? How about none of them get it. Better: You can't register any TLD that has a trademark on it.
So instead you could have apple.com, apple.computers, apple.music, apple.growers, apple.eaters. That preserves the hierarchical nature of TLDs.