[CPops]

I don't know how the internet could easily transition out of this mess, but I think it would probably be good to eventually get rid of as many TLDs other than .com as possible. Does it add any real value to users to have to try and remember and differentiate between .com, .org, .net, .info, .me, .ly, .tv, all the others I'm forgetting about, and now .shoes and .pants and whatever else companies come up with?

It just creates more and more opportunities for phishing attacks to have essentially unlimited TLDs created where it makes it harder for anybody to easily figure out what is the actual home of any company.

Also, I'm not worried about Amazon or Google or Facebook or Microsoft, but for smaller businesses, they're going to be faced with costly and unnecessary legal battles and challenges over all kinds of trademarks. It's such a waste of effort. It's bad enough when there were just a handful of TLDs that were relevant, but now that we have essentially unlimited domain names all sorts of additional costly conflicts will emerge.

If these new TLDs have to exist, one potential way to minimize confusion and minimize disputes would be for all .com owners to automatically be assigned that respective TLD, so you always automatically know that "icloud.apple" is owned by Apple.com and that "books.amazon" is owned by Amazon.com and if you went and bought "xyz12345.com" you would also automatically own the xyz12345 TLD so these disputes would mostly be already settled. But that's not going to happen because there would be no extra money in that.

[Karunamon]

Problem with that (aside from the lack of capitalistic motive) would be management (IIRC, ICANN isn't directly managing the new TLD's, that job goes to the companies who actually end up with them), as well as what happens when someone who illegitimately owns a .com name were to get the associated TLD.