ICANN plan for new TLDs comes under barrage of criticism

Currently, there are just a handful of generic Top Level Domains (gTLDs), including well-known extensions like .com, .net, .org, and .biz. ICANN's new plan would expand the number of potential gTLDs by several orders of magnitude, and would allow for extensions 3-63 characters long. Allowed extensions would include pretty much anything a company might want—Ars Technica, for example, could conceivably register *.ars, *.arstechnica, or *.arstech. ICANN claims that this new system would offer domain name holders vastly improved choices and allow for more diversity in domain names, particularly for non-English-speaking countries. In and of themselves, these are worthy goals, but arbitrarily redefining the meaning of gTLDs seems a poor way to achieve them, particularly when said redefinition wrecks the current system so thoroughly.

ICANN plan for new TLDs comes under barrage of criticism