It's not the sexiest issue around, I realize, but the new proposal that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names & Numbers (ICANN) has approved, for opening up the space of top-level domains, is an important little moment in Internet history, and should be recorded as such so that the historians of the future don't think we were all oblivious to what was going on. [See the NY Times story here, and AP's here; ICANN's discussion of the new proposal can be found here] When ICANN first took over the Net's domain name system in 1998, a lot of us called for it to do something along these very lines, but better late than never. Our reasoning went something like this: The original top-level domains (.com, .org, .edu, .mil, .int, .gov, .net) were chosen, back in 1984, for no real reason at all; Jon Postel, who was basically in charge of the net's naming and numbering systems from its inception until ICANN took over, more-or-less picked them out of a hat, having no idea (in 1984!) what this "Internet" thing would become down the road or why you'd ever need more than 7. There were (and are) NO technical reasons for having only 7 (or 11, or 14, or 278, or any specific number) top-level domains; the naming architecture was built to allow an almost infinite number of TLDs (another one of the truly brilliant scaling mechanisms built into the network that has allowed it to become "the Internet").
Opening up TLD-space is a really good idea -- though not because we necessarily need more TLDs. Personally, I don't really care whether there's an .XXX, or .stuff, or .oldtimeradio, or .Postfamily, or .university, etc. available. Maybe that'll make the Internet a richer, more interesting Internet, as people find new ways to manipulate and utilize this new structure; maybe it won't. No, opening up TLD-space is a good idea because the scarcity was entirely artificial, a means for maintaining a stranglehold over critical Internet resources (domain names). Artificial scarcity is generally speaking a bad thing; people manipulate it to make things valuable that have no inherent value (like domain names); we call the people who maintain artificial scarcity in valuable goods "monopolists," and we don't like them -- for damned good reasons.