This is why I think it is reasonable to reserve some short TLDs until Safe has more general awareness.
This could be done entirely algorithmically/deterministically, eg:
- At launch, reserve every tld under 4 chars in length.
- Every month (or N network operations), one of them becomes available for use.
eg, .a, .b, .c, … .aa, .ab, .ac. .. zz, .aaa, … .zzz. (taking into account other languages, alphabets as well)
The general idea would be to spread these out over time, perhaps aiming for 100 years or even a millenia, so that there’s not such a benefit to a mad squatting rush at the beginning.
I would suggest we even go one step further and require that every name must have one of these short TLDs. That would prevent squabbles over the “special” TLD names. If no one can have one, there’s nothing to be jealous of.
So basically, if McDonalds misses the first 48 months of Safe Network operationn, they can still obtain McDonalds.ad. And farmer Joe McDonald can come along in 10 years and still get McDonalds.gv, etc, etc.
I suppose squatters would still try to jump on the potentially most profitable names in each namespace as they come around, but at least there is a sort of competition for it, and thereby more availability and lower prices than a single global namespace.