CircleID

Historically, however, we leave that question to the market where there’s someone willing to give it a shot.

True, however TLDs are a very restricted marked. The bureaucracy of creating and managing one isn't the main problem. The real stumbling block is that there are no - at least no effective - guidelines what happens if one TLD - by what ever means - is deemed a failure and should be closed down. There have been a few cases of not yet wildly used ccTLDs that have been abandoned or transitioned to a new ccTLD. However even moderately clear situations like .SU aren't handled. A market where failures (like .COOP and to some extend .MUSEUM) aren't removed is a very unhealthy one. You only seem to treat the failure of the entity managing the TLD. While this is an important aspect, failures of complete TLDs are a vital ingredient for marked driven innovation.

An interesting article, and I agree that things in the DNS world need to become more dynamic if genuine innovation in usage is to occur. But arguably the problem isn't the policies imposed by ICANN, so much as the existence of the organisation in its current monopolistic incarnation. ICANN as one root amongst many would be the sober elder statesman, providing a conservative option for those who need it, instead of its current role as Saturnine break on progress.

I worked on some exciting DNS technology at Telnic (the people behind the dotTel TLD) only to have the plug pulled because of fears over diverging too far from existing TLDs - even though for ICANN that must have been an attractive part of the proposition. As a consequence I'm of the opinion that things will not improve until the market in DNS roots is deregulated, not only allowing new TLDs to select between competing root providers (or even establish their own root) but also encouraging a greater number of domain start-ups with clever provisioning models geared towards non-traditional applications.

Deregulation would also establish a credible free-market in trust. Forget hacks like OpenID, with a credible multiplicity of DNS roots and the consumer-oriented tools to support them, application developers and internet users will finally be able to take proper charge of their online identities - maybe even choose to be their own TLDs. Internet 2.0 is just over the horizon: driven from the grassroots; dynamically provisioned; rich with short-lived and randomised domain names; featuring many different DNS provisioning models. The question is, are these traits compatible with any model of DNS understood by ICANN?