Reading some of this discussion leaves me puzzled because I can't tell which things that some people are saying are intended to be about "dotless" use of domains, or are intended to be about the expansion of top level domains in general. The IAB's statement does not seem to be about whether or not new TLDs should be issued, or what good or bad effects that will have; the IAB statement rather seems to assume as a given that new TLDs will come. Yet a significant portion of the debate on this thread seems to be about that. In theory, any of the "classic" TLDs could've been used in a "dotless" fashion, but they haven't been. What the IAB statement is about is to urge that none of the new TLDs be used "dotlessly" either. That's a separate matter from whether they should come into being in the first place. What this brings to mind is that we used to have implicit DNS domain search in the early days of DNS. When edu.com accidentally hijacked a huge chunk of the Internet, most of the net very quickly got rid of implicit search, and we got the explicit DNS search feature that many people are discussing now. If some new TLD gets used in a dotless fashion in a way that truly does cause major trouble, I expect we'll see sites all over the net quickly deploying DNS resolvers that discard A, AAAA, or MX records at the top level, to protect their users. -- Cos