There is no question that the best way to silence the bulk of the valid
criticism would be to make ICANN an administrative function instead of a
policy function. IOW, they should be handing out TLDs, rather than
deciding which TLDs are handed out.
in general, the more popular TLDs you have, the more load you get on the
root servers from cache misses on the NS records for those TLDs.
(seldom-used TLDs don't count because hardly anybody every queries them...)
and *someone* has to decide which TLDs are "handed out". otherwise anyone
could have a vanity TLD, the DNS would collapse to a flat space, and the
root servers would have to handle all queries.
Keith