Bingo. And sadly all new extensions will be affected by the loss of credibility. It's going to send shockwaves across the Internet community. When that happens you will remember you read it here first.
I have made some suggestions to make the TLD approval process more fair.
The application fee is expensive and the financial requirements are stringent. It is a huge barrier to entry. I think that registries who want to sell strings to the public should be financially sound.
But it doesn't suffice to weed out the stupid applications for non-viable extensions.
There is no point in approving hundreds of strings that don't have a market.
I think the financial requirements could be relaxed, but the proposed TLDs should be backed by the public
before they go live. I mean, backed financially. If you want to sell .horse domains go ahead, but you must demonstrate you already have say 10K people ready to buy one (and hopefully keep them). If you can't arouse enough interest at this stage, why insist on putting a flawed product on the market ?
Registries have always underperformed by their own pessimistic estimates, because there are no serious market studies being done. There is a difference between being 'sympathetic' to a TLD concept, and actually paying for it.
Example:
.pro application from 2002.
Nothing has changed.
Also, remember what some domainers used to say: .mobi was a guaranteed success, it couldn't fail because it was 'backed' by Google, Nokia, and a few other industry heavyweights. You know, they have deep pockets, they are super smart and successful and we are just little domainers. What do we know ?
In real life, many products/innovations fail on the market. Google themselves have liquidated dozens of projects, many of which were well beyond the beta stage.
