Once again, I am baffled that people would rather speculate than do
five minutes of reading. (Well, maybe baffled isn't the word.)
There is the question of the fee structure. If the fee is really > $
100,000 USD, then this will damp down the numbers considerably.
The fee isn't set, but I haven't seen any estimates under $100K.
How many .com domains are there ? I have a _2001_ report of 19
million. I would guess maybe 50 million by now.
If you had looked at the GNSO report, you wouldn't have to guess. It
says there are roughly as many 2LDs in .COM as in all other TLDs
combined, a pattern that hasn't changed in years.
What there may be is a raft of trademark lawsuits - for example,
The last numbers I saw was 140M .coms. However, due to the incredible
amount of churn due to domain-tasting by spammers, 50M *stable* .coms
is probably a reasonable guess...
People keep making the assertion that top-level domains that have the
same strings as popular file extensions will be a 'security disaster'
Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom and desire to not abide by standards
it has not set decided that instead of relying on the Mime type (content
type:) field in the HTTP response to determine how this particular
content should be rendered, it would look at the letters following the
last dot in the URL.
There were many viruses which were transmitted this way, with URLs
ending in .EXE which meant that Microsoft blindly executed the contents
fed over the web. Often, the content type: field would point to a
image/jpeg type and standards compliant browsers would simply handle
this as a picture with invalid contents.
I am now sure if Microsoft continues to based data type decisions on
what it interprets as a file extension in a URL or not. But it should
not stop the world from moving on because to those who abide by
standards, such things are not a problem.
However, the issue of http://museum/ is an interesting one. This may
affect certain sites who would have to ensure their resolver firsts
tests a single node name and only add the local domain name if the first
test failed. There may be sites/systems that just automatically tag on
the domain name if they just see what looks like a node name.
