.com is always the worst example that one could use - mainly because it perpetuates the fallacy that it is "just a tld like all the rest". The more that the community treats .com as the exception, not the rule, the easier it will become to start creating rules that make sense across the board.All? Perhaps not. One reason could be, that it will be more difficult for them to catch on like .com has. Unless people get used to a thousand flowers. I am all for it, but not because I think it will increase some market or lead to more competition.We will perhaps never be able to get a true competitor for .com. And if we would like to try, I suggest .net as the candidate. It does not sound cheesy, rather accurately describes what the domain is about, and has no smell of i-came-late-to-this. And if it must be a new string, we should think of something that has the same invitating sound as come(e). Perhaps .here or .now? But I like .net best.
To restate;
Increasing the number of TLDs that have rough semantic equivalents in other TLDs will generally increase the level of service, competition and overall health of the namespace. This may or may not be true with regard to .com.
Re-chartering existing TLDs to address the very specific problems that .com creates doesn't make a lot of sense - it may just be that, in this respect, we have to live with the exception of .com over the short-term and hope that it evens out in the long term.
-rwr
