A bunch of us who were "open" applicants for new TLDs (my company applied for .secure) tried our best to fight this in ICANN. The "closed generic" was not somet

A bunch of us who were "open" applicants for new TLDs (my company applied for .secure) tried our best to fight this in ICANN. The "closed generic" was not something properly anticipated by ICANN when they created the nTLD process (it's an insult to Byzantium to call the rules byzantine) and several large companies, Google and Amazon most brazenly, shoved themselves through some loopholes and created a category that was never supposed to exist. The unfortunate fact is that the ICANN board is pretty spineless, and had no desire to restate the rules to prevent the private domination of generic terms (for example, Amazon wants to control the Chinese word for book, which is pretty aggressive for a company from Seattle when the Chinese invented moveable type). The board was so completely dedicated to moving forward that they endorsed the idea of the winner takes all auction and punted all of their responsibility for choosing which applicants would actually provide the most value to the world. Open small applicants have to win the auction using funds drawn from a business model of selling domains. These closed generic applicants can throw tens of millions of dollars at the auctions based upon the value of having a monopoly on a term like .app, .search or .secure. In the end a bunch of us made pretty speeches and got a bit of traction with the EU government representatives in the ICANN GAC (but not the US, critically) but in the end we were steamrolled by the dozens of lobbyists and lawyers these companies send to every ICANN meeting. Too late for outrage now. The whole process made me highly cynical towards the future of the name system as overseen by ICANN. At least I'm done getting food poisoning in exotic locations three times a year at ICANN meetings.