[BetaMechazawa]

The fact that a company needs their own gTLD is silly. Sites like google have a perfectly good domain. Why use iphone.apple if apple can already do iphone.apple.com or apple.com/iphone? At the end of the day the consumer will not start guessing what domain he/she has to use to get what they want. The average consumer uses a search engine and types in "apple iphone". They don't care about iphone.apple they just want to go to the product page.

[vacri]

Well, it's not about need. It's about a story that goes like this:

    ICANN: Hey, has anyone noticed that our wallets aren't
           very heavy?
    Google: We have a bucketload of money just laying around
           that will fill your wallets, and wouldn't mind
           our own gTLD. It'd be cute.
    ICANN: You had us at 'bucketload of money'

We needed more gTLDs anyway. So what if a few mega-companies get their own versions?

[ChikkaChiChi]

Because ICANN set this up, and companies have to protect their trademarks.

Google isn't going to abandon their perfectly good domains.

[josteink]

> Google isn't going to abandon their perfectly good domains.

Good thing icann just increased the available domain-space from "limited" to "unlimited" then. That sounds good for almost everyone, or at least icann.

[sukilot]

Basically, "" is now a TLD, and ICANN is the registrar, so it can extract the rents.