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I think that's the scale of problem that is facing us with a flat .eu zone, and far more rapidly than anyone here is giving credit.

my impression is we're about to enter an infinite loop.

That in fact is the case already.

While still you might be right, we would now have to discuss growth rates based on market potential etc.

Now you hit upon an interesting issue. In NL we were more or less forced a couple of years ago to open up registration for private persons too, the reasoning behind it being 'fixed' e-mail addresses even when people moved to another ISP, which happened frequently. Initially we 'solved' this by introducing numeric SLD's (123.nl), under which they could register names. That was not a success, to put it mildly: all in all we registered less than 1000 domains of that kind. Main reason: people didn't like the numeric "extension". More recently .NL itself was opened up for private persons too, but now we see a vastly different situation from a couple of years ago: because of the massive amounts of spam 'fixed' addresses are not en vogue anymore and lots of people have loads of addresses. Which is just one reason why I don't expect TLD's to explode and a good example of a problem that solves itself. Piet