http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2007/09/dot_name

New TLDs (Top Level Domains ..  extensions like .com, net etc)  have a hard enough time drumming up new business and competing with established namespaces like .com net etc without being labeled "crime havens" in Wired.

The registries (and registrars for that matter) keep trying to charge for services that were formerly free.. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction..  so as they do this they create opportunities for the criminal element to fester..  So goes the argument anyway.

This story is sort of shrill. Criminals don’t put their real information on whois after all.  They engage in identity theft, they place your and my whois information on records that don’t actually belong to us and then use the names for ill purposes.  That is the biggest problem.

I predict the US Secret Service (which is responsible for identity theft) becomes much busier in the future raiding registrars for the payment records and IP addresses of ne’er-do-wells, in order to track those fraudulent parties who take over the identities of good people to place on domain whois records used for ill purposes (spam, fraud, phishing etc).