The ICANN gTLD expansion is a threat to the whole domain industry but new alternatives will make increasingly less impact to the point where it won't be financially viable to launch them. More established heavily regged and traded alternatives like .info will continue to make progress.
One of the strengths of .info is that information sites are relatively easy to develop technically, easy to maintain because you don't need logins, memberships and customer support, and success is determined more by the quality of information than branding, promotion and cutting edge multimedia web design so they are more accessible for hobbyist developers.
The domain extension hierarchy is like a pyramid, .com is on top, next down is .net and .org, top country ccTLD's, established alternatives, other country ccTLD's, other newer alternatives. ICANN's new gTLD's will be right at the bottom of a very broad based triangle, it will be the registries who launch these new extensions and the new domainers who speculate on them who will be the biggest losers because they will be right at the bottom of the pile and crowded out.
.info has got 5m registrations on the board and that will be virtually impossible for new extensions to mimic, new extensions will struggle to get more than 10,000 registrations because people will only bother with the usual suspect keywords and people wanting sites to develop are going to have plenty of affordable alternatives higher up the extension pyramid.
People have always knocked .info, it's cheap and cheerful and there to be shot at. $1 reg fees was inspired marketing by Afilias and differentiated .info from other alternatives. Obviously the downside is spam but if you a developing a genuine information site why do you need to send emails out in the first place? The appeal to me of .info is I can put together my information offline, I don't have to reply to customer emails and worry about branding and marketing, all I have to do is update information and fine tune my affiliate ads and SEO.
Finding information is one of the main driving forces for people using the Internet so .info has a very clear remit. What is .net's remit apart from being the poor man's .com? What is .biz's remit? What will .mobi do when everybody recognises that all you need to with a mobile site is sniff somebody's browser and screen resolution and deliver the appropriate content from a .com? People will always need information online, it will need updating, there will be new types of information so .info will be in business for quite some time.
I've been buying .info's for 2 years and I've noticed a definite rise in breadth of appeal among domainers in that period. You still get "Is Info dead?" threads but there are more people ready to admit they like .info now. When I bought BankAccounts.info for $625 in Feb 08 there were 25 separate bids on DNF. That's alot of interest for a 2 word .info.
I've bought 2 premium .infos this year; Savings.info for $4,000 in Jan and Coupons.info for $7,000 earlier this month. Uncertainty over the ICANN gTLD expansion, general economic concerns, and the easing of domain speculation after 3-4 strong years will continue to create buying opportunities.
