The entire process is a money grabbing farce.

Put another way, if I'm Microsoft, can I put my website at http://microsoft? Or do I have to use http://www.microsoft?

I've looked to see if there is a policy from ICANN on this, but I can't find one. Historically, TLDs did not themselves point to hosts (or have other things like MX or TXT records).

i just tried to submit

  http://ac/

In fact I just checked that typing "ac" in the Chrome omnibox makes a Google search for "ac" as I would expect. So the value of having an A record on a TLD is limited.

Edit: Somehow I missed the bar on top of the search results that says "Did you mean to go to http://ac " so there's some value after all.

I've worked at many places where http://search/ was the Intranet search facility. Not now though, nope. Now your IT department will be under pressure to accept Big Search's latest site-integrated intranet search which they conveniently started marketing around the time they broke all your local URLs.

People in NY were asked what their browser was and the most common reply was "Google" - and this was before Chrome had any kind of share. People are completely ignorant when it comes to technology.

But you're wrong. When people go to buy a computer, most know what RAM is, i.e., they've heard of it. It's because advertisements always mention it.

http://linux.die.net/man/5/avahi.hosts

Ideally I would've liked to see it evolve into a more clean/friendly structure all together... web//companyname, yourname@companyname, etc.

Yes we'd get the clashes of people that currently have different TLDs of the same name, but maybe solve that by making the new structure an optional extra, so people buy the "new" domains from scratch (and if you currently own all major TLDs for your name, eg Microsoft/Google/Apple/etc, noone else can register your "new" domain). First to buy the new one, gets it. Person who had the differing TLD finds a slightly different one.

These new .whatever really piss me off. It's making the web a messier place, and confusing the average users even more, all for the sake for some greedy fatcats to charge stupid amounts to companies that can afford to throw money at it.

You send it to auction and let them bid to see who gets it.

Or you send things to a dispute resolution provider, e.g., WIPO. Not sure how much revenue they make from these disputes, but it is no doubt growing.

Could this problem be fixed with a technical solution? Maybe. But for ICANN, there's little incentive to fix it because lots of money is made in their system if there are disputes and an illusion of scarcity.

What is true for company names is also true for trademarks. Like company names, trademarks are both restricted to a particular business sector and they are regional.

But ICANN's system keeps things so that there can be only one xyz.com even though there may be many XYZ Corporations around the world, in different business sectors. They do not compete with each other in the real world. But in ICANN's world, they are forced to compete. And this brings in lots of money for ICANN/Registries/Registrars.

ICANN itself has no vested interest in this other than executing its policies, and if the consensus policy had ended up being "no new gTLDs, there are enough" then it wouldn't have embarked on this program.