I have seen many complaints against ICANN over the years. This is a rather poor one that contains a number of errors or poor assumptions. Firstly there is the factual error that the $185,000 is not refundable; it is partially refundable depending on how far through the application you progress, anywhere from a 80% to 20% discount depending on when you pull out. Only applications that are successful are required to pay the final 20% to secure a contract with ICANN.

Also the ANA complains that it hasn't been listened to. This is obviously false; this process has been ongoing for more than 6 years. Anyone can attend ICANN meetings and become involved in policy making processes. A number of ANA members have been involved in the process for some time, their public comments have been received, they have been on IP working groups. This is all public record and can be found on the ICANN website. Issues with respect to various trademark and copyright issues have been debated multiple times, and almost every time trademark holders are not satisfied with protections that exceed those they normally have in the rest of the business / legal world. And when they don't get these egregious demands they complain that they haven't been listened to and try to hold up the process yet again.

Hopefully several years from now there will be greater competition in the market and 85% of the primary domain name market sales won't go to just one company; Verisign.

Disclaimer: I work for a company that intends to apply.

Make the stakes much, much higher for a new TLD, but make the chance of getting one almost assured if you make it through a more rigorous screening process.

The junk that's out there now is embarrassing. .aero? .museum? Are these jokes? It took more than ten years to establish the blindingly obvious .xxx domain while they were flirting with the idea of a .store or .shop domain instead.

Domains are growing increasingly irrelevant when search-engines are the only reliable method for channelling people to what they want, but the namespace pollution we have to endure forever will be a constant source of irritation.

I have almost no idea what the current TLDs are, and even Mozilla, which needs to know this for security reasons, is having trouble keeping up. Regional registrars seem to change their mind as to how they will assign domains without any sort of official notification, no paperwork at all, which seems reckless for a TLD.

Just FYI, Mozilla has more trouble keeping up with various African and Asian registries than with new TLDs like xxx.

DNS should be distributed. Eventually as the shadow P2P DNS system grows in response to the mainstream one being increasingly controlled and factionalized, it will become the dominant DNS system.

I've seen the idea of a distributed DNS system mentioned a few times but I still don't see how it would work out. What happens in the case of multiple people wanting the same domain? How are disputes between what foo.com points to resolved? With no central authority who collects payment? and without payment of some kind what it to stop someone from gathering up an inordinate number of domains as there is no cost to do so.

It stands a good chance of becoming the registry of choice for casual use, especially if it gets an official TLD, but otherwise it's a bit crazy to think it'd ever be used for serious concerns. It's way too shady.

What distributed DNS systems are out there or being developed? I only know of namecoin (the bitcoin fork).