The only people who are in favor of this are those who stand to benefit: ICANN (who likes elaborate meetings in exotic places), registries, back-end providers,

The only people who are in favor of this are those who stand to benefit: ICANN (who likes elaborate meetings in exotic places), registries, back-end providers, advisors (lawyers), and registrars (hello larrys). Did I miss anyone? Any end users who think this will benefit them are clueless. As this blog post says most people have not a clue what the above parties are up to. There are basically two main camps among the applicants: domainers looking to capitalize on type-in navigation and overpriced sales of key terms, and companies looking to protect their trademarks. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive. ICANN is a non-profit organization. They are tax-free. But they treat themselves to perks many for-profit companies only dream about; they live a lavish lifestyle (they just raised 300 million for essentially nothing!) for an organization that is supposed to be acting in the public interest. It is one heck of a racket. There will be non-ICANN DNS with some new features emerging out of this fiasco. You can bet on that. ICANN has gotten far too greedy. The conflicts of interest are blatent and insulting.