"Q34: Has the inventory of useful and available domain names reached an unacceptably
low level?Yes."
"Let say this is a matter of taste."
Let's not. There is
hard evidence regarding the availability of useful names in the gTLD space. A Wired
article in April searched for dictionary words available in dot com and found only
a handful. That was months ago. Millions of names have been registered since.
More
significant evidence is the resale price of certain common words. If "business.com"
resells for $7.5 million, what is that price based on? Certainly not the cost of
maintaining a registration in the DNS database. In general, you see resales of domain
names for $1000+ as a very common thing, the tremendous growth of a domain name aftermarket,
recently joined by NSI itself, which auctions off com names as they expire. Nearly
a million domain names are listed for sale on the GreatDomains broker site. What
is this market based on, if not a shortage of available useful names?
The other
simple answer to the question whether new TLDs are needed is this: if no one wants
them, then no registries will supply them and no consumers will register them. All
indications are that there are many willing registry applicants and hundreds of thousands
of people/organizations willing to use their services.