Re: [soac-newgtldapsup-wg] WT-2 who/what

[Elaine Pruis <elaine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The question "-Is it ok if the applicant only serves a very small part  
of the public?" was posed and the responses so far:
Andrew:  The answer depends on what we might describe as “very small”.  
Denmark is small in population but has a relatively larger footprint  
on the web than the Hausa community which is much larger in terms of  
population.  Absent a very compelling reason to carve out a specific  
small TLD (and an organizational structure to support it), for  
viability I agree that there would need to be some sort of “floor”  
number of say, arbitrarily 500,000 community members, before an  
application is considered.  (This is not a proposed number, just a  
guess).
> Avri: One data-point on community size.
>
> I have been working on infrastructure projects for the last 10 with  
> the Sámi people years who are an indigenous semi-nomadic population  
> that lives in the northern most regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland  
> and the Kola Peninsula in Russia.
> This community is estimated at 80,000 - 135,000.  I always assumed  
> that they were a large enough 'community' to apply for a TLD.  I  
> think they assumed that as well.
Andrew: To the second (implied) part of the question, what is the  
public?  If nearly the only people interested in the TLD are its  
members, is that OK?  I would argue yes, since the community building  
function is a positive good in most cases, even though the “general  
public” might not care much about Hausa literature for example.
After some thought it seems to me that we should not require a floor  
nor a minimum projection of registrations in our criteria. For  
example, ,  .ki ccTLD has less than 1k registrations, yet it serves  
the 96,558 people of its community, Kiribati, and is commercially  
viable (at $1k/domain).
Another reason is that we are seeing significant growth of mobile  
users in 'developing countries'.  Even if there is limited projected  
demand for domain name registrations today, by 2012 when new TLDs are  
launched, entire populations could be using domains through mobile  
technology,  leapfrogging the required infrastructure for  
'traditional' domain usage.
Elaine Pruis
VP Client Services
elaine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
+1 509 899 3161