And also, from a larger standpoint, we have a choice of two mutually exclusive options here. It comes down to either (a) freezing the TLD hierarchy in place an

And also, from a larger standpoint, we have a choice of two mutually exclusive options here. It comes down to either (a) freezing the TLD hierarchy in place and never creating any new ones (e.g. not even for a new country, or .mars or whatever), or (b) not retaining indefinite backwards support for multi-label DNS search lists when they happen to collide with new TLDs. I would argue that, of the two options, option B is the less onerous one, and less restrictive on the future growth of the Internet. It's not that hard to set up some aliases to be able to SSH quickly into the right hosts without having to manually type out longer paths.