> That would break the Internet in a large variety of horrible ways
Scare talk aside, no, it wouldn't. In most cases people would be unaffected; at worst people've dealt with broken links before and will continue to do so. It would only truly "break" anything for early adopters who dove in without thinking, and knew the risks of doing so.
Ask your bosses (the ones you cite here [1] as being the ones calling the actual shots) why everything isn't already .google etc. :)
The 2012 round of gTLDs aren't provisional and they aren't used by "early adopters". They are part of the Internet now. There are millions of sites using them now, and any business owner creating a new site on, e.g., .design, is simply buying a domain name through a registrar; they are not "diving in without thinking" or being "early adopters" or "taking risks".
There were many years of discussion prior to releasing the latest gTLDs. This is not a continually ongoing process; the discussion was completed, and the new gTLDs were released. That can't be gone back on, not without causing harm to millions of website owners and network operators. It's simply not ever going to happen, and trying to argue otherwise isn't a fruitful use of time. Though, by all means, your time is yours to do with what you will, and if you really want to start a movement to try to roll back all the new gTLDs, godspeed. It seems like tilting at windmills to me though.
I've already addressed why everything isn't on .google already -- domain names are sticky, and it takes a lot of work to change the domain name of an established product. It tends not to be worth it. For new webpages though, e.g. environment.google, you're starting to see it being used.
Correction: There are 27.4M domains on new gTLDs registered; full stats here: https://ntldstats.com/tld
The total economic cost of yanking all of those from the existing established sites would easily run into the billions of dollars. Those domain names are on business cards, on sides of vans, on buildings, on advertising, etc. Untold amounts of money have already been spent building up reputations for sites on these new gTLDs, much of which would be lost if the domain name were yanked. The economic damage would be massive. And of course all existing links in press, blogs, social media, etc., would all die. That's why it won't ever happen.
It's about keeping web users safe by preventing certain types of phishing attacks. Support isn't "yanked"; the affected domain names are simply rendered in punycode (which isn't nearly as bad as yanking said domain names from the Internet entirely). There are lots of very real security issues around IDNs.
For decades we've trained users to consider domains that look different as malware.
Several major domains that relied on IDN currently are having issues with exactly that.
Because they had the IDN even on their business card, and now users are calling their support because of malware.
We already gave one company control over a major part of internet infrastructure, they are destroying other businesses, and we want to allow their questionable management to control more of the internet?
Scare talk aside, no, it wouldn't. In most cases people would be unaffected; at worst people've dealt with broken links before and will continue to do so. It would only truly "break" anything for early adopters who dove in without thinking, and knew the risks of doing so.
Ask your bosses (the ones you cite here [1] as being the ones calling the actual shots) why everything isn't already .google etc. :)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14490271