>opening up TLDs for sale seems like a (somewhat) logical way to expand the available namespace for domains.
It does the reverse. There is only one root zone. Before the root was a free-for-all there were hundreds of different areas to set up shop in the namespace. Now there are exactly two: 1. have fuckloads of money to piss away on a vanity TLD, or 2. use someone else's TLD.
Every TLD has the same possibility space as the root zone, but we only get one root zone. There are no do-overs. Careful creation of TLDs allowed mistakes of previous TLDs models to not be repeated, experimentation with different implementations, business models or namespace allocation strategies. Now there's exactly one.
We used to have headroom at the top to sidestep "hope an existing brand isn't squatting the name" and try things like country code TLDs, .arpa, and .int. Or tack resolution experiment onto the side with .local or .onion.
If you wanted to do any of those now, it's impossible because the namespace has been reduced. Go back to options 1 and 2.
It does the reverse. There is only one root zone. Before the root was a free-for-all there were hundreds of different areas to set up shop in the namespace. Now there are exactly two: 1. have fuckloads of money to piss away on a vanity TLD, or 2. use someone else's TLD.
Every TLD has the same possibility space as the root zone, but we only get one root zone. There are no do-overs. Careful creation of TLDs allowed mistakes of previous TLDs models to not be repeated, experimentation with different implementations, business models or namespace allocation strategies. Now there's exactly one.
We used to have headroom at the top to sidestep "hope an existing brand isn't squatting the name" and try things like country code TLDs, .arpa, and .int. Or tack resolution experiment onto the side with .local or .onion.
If you wanted to do any of those now, it's impossible because the namespace has been reduced. Go back to options 1 and 2.