[delineal]

None of it is idiotic. It is just different than before.

This creates greater competition in the registrar market which will keep domain prices down. It also dilutes the value of any particular domain name, which is a Good Thing (tm). I would be very happy to see the whole domaining business model disappear.

The proliferation of new domains is one of the issues I'm grappling with in my work on delineal.com.

[rlpb]

It doesn't do this at all. It just shifts the crowded .com space into the root space, causes more confusion for everyone, and eliminates the possibility of any future expansion. Once a name is allocated, it's gone forever - you can't just demand it back or change the rules.

[delineal]

It doesn't move anything onto the root space, AFAIK. Do you have a link supporting that assertion? My understanding is that this just creates more TLDs under which domains can be registered.

There is no more confusion created. (Almost) all existing TLDs have domains in them that should not be there based on the original "purpose" of the TLDs.

The .com domain only ever made sense in the context of a single language and a single country. It's only crowded because it is one of the first ones that anyone could register in. If all the TLDs that exist today existed at the beginning, the landscape would be very different.

The notion that "once a name is allocated, it's gone forever" is no different than today. More TLDs provide more opportunities for similarly named companies or organizations to have some form of their name. It "prevents" large companies from dominating all forms of a name.