Having some hierarchy or structure to DNS would be better. But that ship sailed around 1996 when Postel explicitly rejected the idea of closing .COM

Having some hierarchy or structure to DNS would be better. But that ship sailed around 1996 when Postel explicitly rejected the idea of closing .COM So, the argument goes, just close the COM (and NET and ORG) domain to new registrations and tell all those making registration requests "were sorry, COM was a mistake, you now have to register under your country code". After all, by the growth argument, in a couple of years the number of companies in COM will be a small percentage of the total population. I don't think this will work. There would certainly be a lot of complaints (and probably legal actions) suggesting that some unfair practices were being followed and that the new requesters were being arbitrarily disadvantaged. I think it would be hard to argue that over 200,000 registrations following a procedure in place over 5 years was a small mistake. Leaving .COM to be the everything TLD pretty solidly settled the non-existence of hierarchy in the public space, which I see directly paving way for these "new" gtlds.