Why, oh why, does everyone assume that a plethora of TLDs implies that all those TLDs must contain a complete copy of .com?<p>I claim the problem with the first big expansion - .pro, .info, etc - is that it WASN'T wholesale. Yes, if half the Internet thinks that only .com exists, and you add .biz, every corporation has to go register .biz as well.<p>If you add a thousand real, active, well-used TLDs, they don't, simply because that is no longer how the Internet works. We already see the start of this with ccTLDs; Apple (a pretty aggressive trademark defender) does not own <a href="http://www.apple.fm" rel="nofollow">http://www.apple.fm</a>, and nobody expects them to, and nobody is confused that they don't. I'm sure my grandmother sometimes confused Elvis Costello with Elvis Presley, but nobody thought the one was impersonating the other, because people have last names, and that's how it works, and that's normal.<p>Five years ago, the average American non-technologist's mental model of the Internet was "you type the company name and .com, except sometimes it's .net and I don't know why". Now it's probably a little more nuanced - but only a little, because .com is still Where Everything Is.<p>If you change that, you've changed that. Because you changed it. So it's not the same.
I don't see how this can be fixed. I have yet to see a single proposal for internet governance that makes me feel "safer" than the current arrangement.<p>Whatever entity is given control of the global name or number spaces has extraordinary power. Any such organization will be subject to corruption, both from within (the subject of the article) and without (e.g. SOPA). Moving governance up to higher levels of government (like the U.N.) isn't any better. Do we really want France or the WIPO to have any input, much less China or Russia? That's a rhetorical question for anyone concerned about censorship.<p>I think it inevitable that the Internet will continue to splinter along national boundaries. Ultimately, the internet will consist of national networks, separate and insular to varying degrees. The challenge for hackers will be how to connect to the networks outside of our own respective countries.
While I don't advocate for breaking up ICANN, this article "Fixing DNS -- how to break up ICANN" (<a href="http://www.templetons.com/brad/dns/fix.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.templetons.com/brad/dns/fix.html</a>) presents a decent approach to the TLD 'problem' that would not focus on useless branding TLDs but instead encourage only TLDs that were going to add value to the Internet. In short, the idea is to only allow non-generic TLDs to be registered to force the TLD operator to differentiate their TLD from others, rather than just being the first one to register '.bank'.<p>It doesn't offer a solution to the complaint in the article that organizations will have to register 'apple', 'mcdonalds', or 'cocacola' in each new TLD, but I'm less sympathetic to that concern.
This is a nice complaint against ICANN, but I'm disappointed that it didn't explain any potential solutions to the problem.<p>Whose hands should DNS oversight be in? What alternative solutions are out there?