RealNames was doing well (Score 1)

From the founder's weblog, it seems RealNames was doing pretty well at one point:

"We were profitable and growing fast (about 120% a quarter back in Q1 2002.

Secondly, we had an awesome business model. Resellers all over the world were selling Keywords. Most uptake was in China, Korea and Japan where we were the only way to make local languages useable as navigational addresses. We had pretty strict controls on ownership but we were able to segment nations into seperate namespaces. Today we would do local keywords too.

Thirdly, we were doing 1 billion resolutions a quarter in Q1 2002. That was page views that MSN lost to us because we were able to provide direct navigation to a web page from a keyword. Microsoft decided to close us down in order to regain those page views. Search this blog for the story. There is a patent. You (Yahoo) own it through your acquisition of 3721."

http://www.teare.com/index.php/pages/196

There is some merit to the concept -- the web browser would theoretically work better if it had one input box instead of two (the address bar and the search bar)

But it's hard to envision ICANN letting loose of TLD's that freely. The price they want for a domain is rediculous...