Ok, so this will probably fly over the heads of many of you but can someone please tell me why ICANN keeps wasting time, money and resources creating new top-level domains like .BIZ or .XXX?  (Besides the obvious explanation that ICANN has just devolved into a money-sucking vacuum that has given up on serving any useful purpose – which is probably the only correct answer to my question, come to think of it.)

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) recently opened the doors for yet more new top-level domains (TLDs). TLDs, which are part of the Domain Name System (DNS), such as .com and .net, are the last label of fully qualified domain names. These are used to give human readable addresses to the Internet’s cryptic IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. So far, so good.

Now, for no really good reasons, ICANN plans on adding as many as two thousand new TLDs. [!!!]  [...]

I think the vast majority of the new TLDs are going to be a waste of time and money for Website owners. Doubt me? Here’s some food for thought from an academic study of how important the .BIZ TLD was in 2011 (PDF Link), ten-years after it was introduced. The researchers found that, “The biz TLD occurs 140 times less frequently than com in the Alexa [A site that tracks the popularity of Web sites] 1 million, 323 times less frequently in the Alexa 500 (based on 1 occurrence), and 218 times less frequently in the Open Directory Project. Note that the com zone is about 46 times larger than biz. Although not a formal assessment of usage, these statistics suggest a disproportionally lower popularity of biz compared to com.” So, sure go ahead and get one of those new TLDs for your next Web site, just don’t expect anyone to visit you there.

To anyone who has an ounce of common sense and a basic understanding of how business on the Internet works, here’s what is obviously destined to happen upon the release of a new steaming pile of TLDs:

• Companies with deep pockets and tons of trademarks will be forced to very quickly spend hundreds of thousands of dollars (minimum) to both (a) register all of their trademarks (and every conceivable permutation thereof) under all of the new TLDs, and then (b) renew all of those TENS OF THOUSANDS of registrations year after year in perpetuity forever (nice business model!).
• Perhaps even before such deep-pocketed companies swoop in to defensively register their new domains, phishers and other shady sorts will have a bonanza registering tons of misleading web addresses like www.bankofamerica.corp in order to scam tons of people who think they’re going to a company’s real website.
• People who want to set up a web presence that appeals to lots of folks (including grandmas and low-information voters who have a hard enough time understanding backslash-backslash-”dot”-colon-hyphen-”com”-burrito) will still do it under .COM.  Because grandma doesn’t get .IDIOT and will probably type in the .COM version – and this is why the guy who only registered under .IDIOT will see his competitors immediately register the .COM version of his business name so they can siphon up all those sweet, sweet grandmas.  OR, if our intrepid web presence-builder registers his snazzy new domain name under .COM AND .IDIOT – then what the hell was the point of creating .IDIOT anyway if it just points back to .COM??
• Finally, and most importantly, no one will ever come to pay attention to something like .IDIOT because no one will be actively using it or marketing it anywhere.

So!  After countless hundreds of millions of dollars go swirling down the toilet… Great success!

…

.IDIOTs