Be wary of vanity TLDs and even some country codes, they may be available but once the renewal rolls around and you've invested time and effort into establishing a presence there, you may be in for a price shock.
It's always struck me as odd that TLDs are not just, well, freely configurable? Domains have always been subject to so much artificial scarcity for seemingly no reason. Why can't a DNS resolver handle .whatever?
The social fabric of the system would fall apart if people could trivially buy top level domains. Even the not so trivial buying that ICANN began in 2015 in order to profiteer was a serious mistake (to everyone besides ICANN).
it would be a global first come first serve namespace.
I never heard of OpenNIC before! Cool project. I wonder how complicated would it be for a layperson like me to have my website work on OpenNIC and regular DNS at the same time
Not sure it's possible because dotCom is owned by verisign and designated to the internet root servers. Your ISP, ISP Peering DNS, and any other DNS service would override any of your DNS zones.
It does make me wonder if I hosted my own root servers for a new dotCom tld would I get chased down by the internet police?
No, there's no internet police who would stop you from doing that. However you had better point your .com to Verisign's .com or so many things won't work when connected to your DNS server. Also you will never get IANA to recognise you as the new authority for .com. Your stuff will only be useful to people who deliberately point to your root zone.
Maybe it's useful for ICANN to delegate management to different orgs (mostly corporations) so they don't have to control every single website on earth directly
I would actually prefer for the ICANN to have even less power and for the whole system to be even more distributed
dot org is right there and is at least run by a non profit. The SAVE .ORG campaign succeeded in preventing private equity from buying it out. Thanks to EFF, Wikipedia, NPR, Greenpeace, the YMCA, and even the Girl Scouts!
it would be a global first come first serve namespace.
You either use taxes from everyone to pay for it or you take money from the people using the thing.
Don't give them money until they stop wasting what they have, and chastise them for begging so hard.
One solution is running your own DNS servers. This way you can list your own TLD's. However good luck in convincing others to change their DNS.
It does make me wonder if I hosted my own root servers for a new dotCom tld would I get chased down by the internet police?
I would actually prefer for the ICANN to have even less power and for the whole system to be even more distributed
https://meltd.ooo/wn
for my little NFT project
Maybe it's a good thing we are all afraid to visit any other tld other than dotCom.
browsers hiding most of the URL also negated much of the importance and was a nail
QR codes on everything and all phones in everyone's hands all the time was another nail
You just don't want a scammy TLD but not even sure what those are these days anymore