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

[Richard Tindal <richardtindal@xxxxxx>]

i agree that a minimum number of eligible community members will be hard to 
define,  and may not be relevant.

RT


On May 24, 2010, at 9:25 AM, Elaine Pruis wrote:

> 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
>