In his blog, Jeff Pulver writes that his .tel application is dead because the ICANN review team "sees '.tel' creating conflict with 'e164.arpa.'" I certainly see the overlap between the activities in e164.arpa and the .TEL applications, but how exactly do the two conflict? I have no pony in this race, but it strikes me that you could have multiple sectors of the namespace working on telephony applications without creating "conflict." "You can celebrate anything you want..."

Perhaps the objection is simply that .TEL is a highly marketable string and a delegation bearing the imprimatur of ICANN might provide unwarranted market leadership to one specific player. I get that. Still, ICANN's in a bind. It wants to avoid the Network Solutions windfall and dominance that came with the .COM delegation while trying to create registry-level competition at the same time. With the way new TLDs are awarded now, those principles are at odds.  Eventually ICANN's going to have to award a TLD in a significant market (e.g., a .TEL or .WEB or .XXX), however, and it has to find a way to do so without making market winners and losers. I suppose an auction is one way to deal with that, but just what where would or should the proceeds go?