ICANN Drops Directly Elected Board Seats

[Mike_Mackin]

"SHANGHAI, China (AP) - The group that oversees Internet addresses finalized changes Thursday that end direct elections to its board of directors - a move critics complain could make the group indifferent to ordinary users and hurt innovation."

AP Story [ap.tbo.com]

[jeremy goodrich]

That reads pretty bad - though I don't know if it is, or if that's spin....why do we need three more domain name extensions?

Also Thursday, Lynn said he would recommend creating three new Internet domain names, though he said there were no plans yet on when to create them or what they would be called.

Why is this, exactly? Just to make it harder for little guys who established a brand as 'widgets-r-us.com', to now have to compete to make sure people don't get confused when a competitor buys 'widgets-r-us.extension'

The reason I'm confused, is that the guy also said there was a slowing global demand for new domain names - which makes sense, with the cooling economy, and the fading of the 'gold rush fever' that plagued a lot of US based businesses (not sure about the global implications, but in the us, we know it was and still is in many ways, a frenzy).

Furthermore, aren't 'a lot' (dunno how many) .biz, .info's still 'held up' or something along those lines....?

Also, won't this move further confuse many consumers?

Help me out, here: what's the positive spin on all this?