mbauser2 - 8:40 am on Mar 22, 2004 (gmt 0)

Can anyone propose one?

Anyone who wants to spend $45,000 on the application fee. That's the cost to just file the application -- after that, ICANN decides (more or less in secret) whether the proposal is worth putting through a complete evaluation process.

That means there may actually have been more than 9 new TLDs proposed, but ICANN thought the other proposals were too pathetic to bother announcing to the public -- in which case, the authors of the pathetic proposals would still be out $45,000 each. As my little brother would put it, "Sucks to be those guys".