Re: [wg-c] Re: IP/TM Concerns & New GTLDs

[Milton Mueller <mueller@syr.edu>]

Roeland:
Thanks for the dose of business rationality.
The issue of how many TLDs the market can sustain is, however, different
from the issue of how many ICANN should be willing to authorize. In
principle, ICANN should make room in the root for a number of names, up to
the limit where technical instability might be caused. It should then let
the market decide how many of them registries registering names under those
TLDs actually survive.

Based on your business projections, I take it you would agree with the
proposition that the number of new TLDs should not be fixed, but determined
by the number of registries willing to operate them.


Roeland M.J. Meyer wrote:

> It is equally certain that we will not have a gTLD growth-rate at anywhere
>
> near one-tenth of the scale of the domain name growth, under
> COM/NET/ORG. While the pent-up demand may be great, it is not that
> great.
>
> Deploying one new commercial TLD registry, at current estimates (I do
> this for a living), would cost $2MUS to $4MUS, including data center and
> staff, not including $2.9MUS for registry software
> development/deployment. Operationally, costs are expected to be
> approximately $1.5MUS annually. More importantly, the start-up time
> requirement is a minimum of 8-10 calendar months.
>
> Deploying 100 new TLDs, simultaneously,  would then consume, at
> best-case, $490MUS over a period of 8 months. This is in the face of a
> market that is proven to yield no more than $90MUS per annum, in gross
> revenue. In fact, these business concerns are the main reason the market
> studies have yielded such a low number of new gTLDs. It is simply not
> possible to fund them all in such a short time period. Even the ccTLDs,
> that we already have, are having trouble getting funded for full
> deployment.
>
> I hope that I have made it clear that technical considerations at the
> least of the problems. Indeed, I consider them to be red herrings.
>
> --------------------
> Roeland M.J. Meyer, CEO
> Morgan Hill Software Company, Inc.
> http://www.mhsc.com/
> mailto://rmeyer@mhsc.com
> --------------------
> Lead; Follow; Get out of the way.
>      ... pick ONE!



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syracuse university          http://istweb.syr.edu/~mueller/