I actually did a fairly robust empirical analysis of the extent to which brand owners did 'register their name in many of them' back when the round of ICANN gTL

I actually did a fairly robust empirical analysis of the extent to which brand owners did 'register their name in many of them' back when the round of ICANN gTLD expansions was happening. The conclusion was that both currently-fashionable arguments were kinda bogus: the new gTLDs couldn't deal with 'artificial scarcity' in any real sense, if it even existed, and yet few brand owners were defensively registering in the existing domains (even .org) so claims that it would extract massive economic rent were also overblown. It was eventually published in the Journal of Information Policy (vol.3, pp.464-484). There's a full-text copy on https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ba4ca100-2f81-43ea-b207-8403e828e87a https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:ba4ca100-2f81-43ea-b207-84... if anyone's interested...