A few new good gTLD's would help matters greatly. Speaking
personally, my future hopes of ecommerce success are vested in a wonderful .web domain
that I pre-registered recently.I stand no chance of either registering such a
perfect business domain in .com or .net. With perhaps 4 or 5 new gTLD's - all 3 letters(?),
certainly all broadly applicable, more people stand a chance of success. I would
of course hope that if .web is selected as one of the first batch of new gTLDs (as
logic dictates) IODesign's database of pre-registered domains would stand; I have
no doubt that if this database was emptied, professional speculators with server
farms would quickly snap up almost every .web domain so far registered and deprive
thousands of people of their future hopes of operating a successful website.
That
speculators are among the registrants to date is to my mind incidental - the namespace
will still be opened up considerably. Anyone who has registered a trademark could
be ejected according to the same procedure as for other TLD's under ICANN authority.
That
said, there is no reason, per se, why IOD should be the only or even a registrar
of .web after entry into the root server. In that respect, Mike Roberts is completely
right when he stresses the importance of prospective registrars' business plans.
The .web database is a different issue altogether.