What does "polluting the namespace" even mean? Is getting a new domain polluting the namespace? Maybe shutdown the web and have only a single site to be more cyberenvironment friendly?

This isn‘t polluting anything, this is a new namespace entirely

Polluting the gTLD namespace, I suppose. Though I have zero thoughts on the matter personally.

This is a good use of namespace. No other global trademark should ever get this TLD

Canon is another one that has their own gtld

https://global.canon/en/

There's literally thousands of them https://www.internic.net/domain/root.zone

Sony even uses theirs all the time: https://pro.sony/

Or no other trademark should get any TLD maybe?

Corporations are not the owners of the the internet.

Okay, let’s not let “corporations” buy domain names at all then. The difference between foo.bestbuy and foo.bestbuy.com is cultural, namely that you personally are used to one but not the other. Corporations are as much the owners of the internet as they have been for…decades. The registries for .com and .net are operated by publicly-listed billion-dollars-in-revenue-earning Verisign. The majority of the internet’s underlying infrastructure is owned by for-profit entities that are in it to make money from you.

The reality is that the commercialisation of the Internet is the only reason that you or I or venture capitalist plaything Hacker News are all even here at all. ICANN just found a way to extract buckets of money from brand-obsessed companies for essentially just adding a line to a database. It’s hilarious and I challenge you to point out how this itself is affecting the openness of the Internet in any tangible way.

Of course it is also notable that the whole DNS hierarchy was managed by Network Solutions, with even less oversight, before ICANN was established.

So you must be against all GTLDs, not just .bestbuy right? They're all polluting the namespace. It shouldn't matter who bought it, "pollution" or whatever that constitutes, still exists?

I am frankly, it's an abuse of power that's forced on the populace without recourse.

Why are TLDs so special? Why are the few known private TLDs (com/net/edu/gov, etc) so important, how are they so special that it is valuable to society to keep them limited?

I think the everyday person doesn't even understand that google.com is a little endian hierarchy.

Somebody forces you to click on bestbuy links and shop in their stores?

Are they in the room right now?

I am anticipating exciting new phishing attempts from customers of unscrupulous registrars on everything from apple.comp to zoom.uss

I doubt it's that easy to pull something like that off. And besides, people fall for phishing scams even when the domain name isn't even close to what they're trying to imitate.

Is it any different from them "polluting" the .com namespace previously?

How is this polluting?