Is this really a problem? No alternate TLDs have ever caught on. .com continues to be the only TLD that most people care about. Even a .net domain makes you a second-class citizen on the web.
It's really a problem because there's no telling what might be a domain tomorrow. Will ICANN sell `.x` to buy everyone on the board a new car? Will they start issuing gTLDs in Klingon language? What about Emoji?
This makes writing code that vets a fully qualified domain name a lot more complicated. If anything could be a domain name they you need to lean on DNS to do testing, and if that's not producing concrete answers, you have no idea if it's valid or not.
Is clownpenis.fart a possible domain? Twenty years ago, no way that would ever happen. Now I'm surprised it hasn't.
Ideally you want a root namespace that's clean, orderly and predictable so that people can comprehend it. microsoft.com looks legit. microsoft4u.info feels sketchy, and it should. microsoft.xyz is...legit? Or not? I can't tell any more, the waters are so muddied.
Plus, ICANN doesn't seem to consider the ramifications of some of their decisions. The right-to-left gTLDs are obviously a great thing for speakers of certain languages like Hebrew and Arabic, but they also carry severe security hazards: http://www.rafayhackingarticles.net/2016/08/google-chrome-fi...
TLD/SLD should never have been a paradigm. I say merge SLDs from .com into TLDs and start selling TLDs only. With all pre existing TLDs grandfathered in.
