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.