https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_mTCFFrQ4A

4:04-5:30 Reflecting on the formalization of ICANN circa 1998(?), emphasis added:
"…it was an interesting… and complicated birth - we did create competition for that, for registries and registrars, and probably biggest question which is there be more TLD’s — top-level domains, like .org, .com and - now you have .info, .net, now there’s even more …there's big controversies over dot XXX. There were some people who thought - you know - “Why not create millions of them?” - which in theory is fine - we’re going to (at some point) come back to this - ya know, theory is fine - but what they didn’t really realize was that the shortage of domain names [was not the issue] … the domain names - it's a space in people's minds. And if you have an infinite number of domain names, you might have is not have any, in a sense - and that may well happen because people now searching for Google or apps, and world keeps kind of flexing and creating a new… yeah - when something get too large or too monopolistic, new things emerge in an orthogonal dimension - and that's what you're seeing now, and, surprise, annotation’s one of them.

what became of the web? What domain names were meant to be were to correspond to a space in your mind - but if you had millions, it would be just as good as not having any

Wherein they were considering the structure … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_mTCFFrQ4A&t=260s