Yeah, this does come to mind…
Here’s a variation: users are free to choose which such TLD’s to use. And under what names. So a commericial company may indeed create .business and charge money for registration there. But I as a user am still free to use their TLD or not and under which name. I can “mount” it as .c or .racket.
When a new user joins he is presented with a choice from say 20 most popular such “TLD”-s. He may click any number of them he likes and can change the names he’d like to use them under. This hopefully makes it easy for common people to start using the network.
So billboards will only be able to use names in this .business if it gains a wide enough popularity among users. And if these users more or less agree on which name to use it under (.business or .racket). And a user may still end up on a wrong website if his .business is not the one the advertiser meant… Hmm…
At one point I was thinking that MaidSafe Foundation could spawn a proxy Limited companany running one such namespace. The charter of the company would be written in such a way that all profit earned would be donated back to foundation. Separate company was suggested to idemnify the Foundation in case of a legal dispute.
Not all such registries have to be commercial. Some can be first-come-first served or any other schema. I was talking of this somewhat in my first topic but I decided to repeat the ideas here because of similarity.