Not true, and you can see it yourself:
Nothing technically prevents a TLD from having an A record, it's just uncommon. So there could very well be http://microsoft/ or http://apple/, which would appear as "microsoft" and "apple" in FF and Chrome, at least.
nslookup tm
Non-existent domain
% dig a tm
; <<>> DiG 9.7.3 <<>> a tm.
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 41011
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;tm. IN A
;; ANSWER SECTION:
tm. 86366 IN A 193.223.78.213
;; Query time: 1 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.66.32#53(192.168.66.32)
;; WHEN: Thu Jan 12 10:20:15 2012
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 36
% nmap tm.
Starting Nmap 5.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2012-01-12 10:24 BRST
Interesting ports on serv213.icb.co.uk (193.223.78.213):
Not shown: 997 filtered ports
PORT STATE SERVICE
80/tcp open http
113/tcp closed auth
443/tcp open httpsAnd yes, browsers redirect to .com if you jut put "tm", but at least Firefox loads the correct website if you put the whole URL, with http://
Server: 8.8.8.8
Address: 8.8.8.8#53
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: tm
Address: 193.223.78.213
You should also note that email addresses that doesn't have a '.' in the host part are technically invalid, i.e. me@mytld is not a valid fully qualified email address.
You should also note that email addresses that doesn't have a '.' in the host part are technically invalid, i.e. me@mytld is not a valid fully qualified email address.
Hmm, has RFC 2822 been superseded? Because it clearly says the domain part can be a dot-atom, which is defined in the same RFC in ABNF form as:
dot-atom = [CFWS] dot-atom-text [CFWS]
dot-atom-text = 1*atext *("." 1*atext)
Trademarks in which country / how do they plan to cope with conflicting trademarks?
Geographic protections, .norfolk - does that refer to the county in the UK or to one of the places in the US, or else where?
Trademark protections come in three parts. At the top level a trademark holder can object to you applying for a TLD that is an exact match for a trademark they hold in any jurisdiction. There are provision for trademark front running as well here. At the second level registries are required to provide protection for trademark holders both at registry start up (sunrise and landrush) as well as for ongoing operations. The protections during sunrise and landrush are stronger than during ongoing operations.
During sunrise and landrush registries are required to restrict registrations that are an exact match to marks in the trademark clearing house. They are also required to implement the Uniform Rapid Suspension (URS) during sunrise and landrush and the first 60 days of general availability. There is also a requirement for the UDRP for ongoing operations but this is almost exactly the same for other existing gTLDs (ccTLDs are a different matter).
Obviously there are corner cases to the above and there are a large number of details involved. If you want more information a good starting point is the Applicant Guidebook which you can get from this link:
http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/agb
EDIT: added information about UDRP.