ICANN participation

Greetings. The new GTLD's are a complete waste of time and effort, and are a massive failure before they've even been initiated. No one will build websites on them, and only speculators will buy them. Insiders and speculators have already bought up all the premium generic names. .MOBI and .ASIA domains are now worthless, because there will be little or no development on these names. The so called "Sunrise" and Landrush" are a joke: these periods were done so quietly and under the radar that only a very very small set of insiders have the best names.

ICANN Administration is working on an outdated premise: that there exists a major demand for new internet categorizations and domain name endings. This premise is built on the antiquated notions of the 1999-2000 era, where there was a great sense of urgency to create more name endings. This era was just before the dot com "bust"; where an overabundance of speculation in .com domain name endings led to an artificial inflation of the market (much like the US housing market today).

There already exists .biz, .name .pro and .info which have seen very little if any web development. Adding more gTLD's may give even more advantages to rich corporations over smaller, independent individuals who cant afford expensive advertising on google, AOL, etc. This would raise ANTITRUST issues; where ICANN policy would become a defacto beneficiary to a particular class of business interests. Smaller companies and individuals need the built in traffic generating value that the current names can provide.

It is clear that there is an administrative policy of ICANN to neatly categorize the internet by domain name extensions. It's too late to do this. The internet is already 'liberalized' to the point that domain name extentions mean nothing with respect to their web content. An online store could be a .org, a information website could be a .com, etc. This is because ICANN has correctly not interferred or regulated who gets what domain name endings; and for what their purpose is to be at the point of registration. This is because such a regualtion is not enforceable.