EGAD! A Whole Bunch of Silly, Pointless New TLDs!

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What are words for, when no one listens anymore?

I've been around Silicon Valley for a long time now, and in the course of those decades I've developed a pretty good grasp on technology.  So when someone floats a new business idea, a new product or service, I can usually figure out what they were thinking, even when the idea itself was silly, wrongheaded, or just another bald-faced money grab.

So when ICANN announced the applicants for the new gTLD program a couple weeks ago, it was pretty clear that somebody misses the endless stream of free money that has been generated by domain registrations, and wanted a way to re-open that spigot.  But beyond that, I was left kind of scratching my head.  What problem is this supposed to solve?  Have the domain names and resultant URLs gotten so complicated that we can no longer find the web pages we're looking for?  Well that sure doesn't seem to be the case, but it does make us realize that we don't actually type in URLs anymore.  We use search engines, links and bookmarks - in other words, we click,we don't type.  Is there content we'd have that we don't have now if we had new TLDs?  Unlikely - we have plenty of apps even without the .app gTLD, and we don't seem to lack for web content from Google or Apple even though they both have to use that good old standby, .com instead of .apple or .google.  Would the web suddenly have a bunch of cool new sites if only they could be set up under a .cool domain?  Doubtful.

So essentially, it's an opportunity for companies to pay millions more for a different address to the pages they already have.  The amazing thing is not that ICANN made such an offer, but that our supposedly brilliant business elite has leaped at the opportunity to spend that money.  The Internet continues to provide proof that PT Barnum was right, if a little understated.

But then I looked at the list of gTLDs from the formal application process.  I'm not sure why we need both an .xxx TLD to help protect kids AND a .catholic Domain that would presumably serve the same purpose.  And what would be the use case for .kosher?  Can a website BE kosher?  It's sad that we've had to go this long without having access to the .ketchup Top Level Domain, because that's where I'd want all my sites to be.  But frankly, I can only cringe when I think about who might want to use a .cool URL, and let's face it, .secure is just a REALLY bad idea because half the people in the world will think it IS, while the other half will be registering .secure sites to rip them off.  And in the end, there's a .vodka TLD but nobody thought to apply for .zombie, so the process is obviously inherently flawed.
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