Registrars and registries have started to push more strongly for some kind of privacy protection.

Why is that? Because it costs them every time they have to go on a wild goose chase for some IP weenie? Because the more privacy they are able to offer, the more domain names they are able to sell? Because, as I pointed out here previously, offshore registrars such as here in Canada must adhere to national privacy laws regardless of what ICANN mandates, thus leaving them in a tenuous situation. Because they are good corporate citizens? First, I am surprised to find such strange bedfellows. Seond, I am surprised they find civil society folks so suddenly attractive. Have they just imbibed too much alcohol? Please advise. -g

The SPAM problem long predates ICANN and would likely be increasing as it is even if ICANN never existed. Simply creating more TLDs isn't even a partial solution to SPAM, spammers use trojans to scan storage devices like hard drives, and use bots to mine the WHOIS and crawl websites and USENET and suchlike to vacuum up email addresses. They look for anything matching the pattern *@*.* . Adding more possibilities to the rightmost wildcard wouldn't make any difference. -g