Comment by hananova
1 day ago
It simply cannot be both free and free choice of domain.
If it has both, it will be squatted to uselessness, and blocked everywhere because of phishing scams everywhere.
You can either make the domains cost money, which seems counter to the entire point, or disallow choosing the domain, instead handing out free what3words style names.
We have considered this, all of these things will be examined during the evaluation process of the application with ICANN before any approval to operate the TLD is granted. We could also police our domain and revoke users who use it for abuse but that may be too costly. But you are right that fundamentally we must protect the reputation of the TLD at all costs and that will require imposing certain limits on its use.
You should read their proposal. Specifically, the first "core feature": one person, one domain. If you want to squat on a domain, go for it -- it's yours, and that's the only domain you're getting.
I suppose this will be done by ID verification, which is a complete and total non-starter for me, but they do have a vision of some kind.
I've read it, I don't believe it will be effective, even with actual physical ID verification. Scammers can get more IDs, for example by way of scamming.