Re: [soac-newgtldapsup-wg] Some comments/questions for our call

[Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

There was another area of unstated cost to the applicant, the three years
continuity of operations funding requirement.

I commented on the issue to the DAGv4 comments [1] but in a nutshell, for
each 1k of registrants, on the order of 10 or fewer transactions against the
SRS is an estimate of "load" when a registry has ceased operations and is just
servicing renewals and other ancilliary traffic. The requirement to for the
SRS to be capable of continuity operations with a density of one complete
database transaction per minute is a registration base the size of the .cat
registry at present, or about 40k registrants.

Therefore the upper bound on contunity cost for registries which convert to
continuity operations having fewer than 10^^6 registrations is ICANN's own
annual per-registry oversight labor staffing, now on the order of USD 25k/yr,
with negligible platform cost.

I think putting a number on continuity is important, particularly where the
"fails at" expectation for the revenue an expense projections of applicant
operators is consistent with linguistic and cultural communities lacking
state support.

I only mention this because in reading the 1 & 2 papers I'd not come across
a treatment of the continuity cost as an undefined risk to applicants.

Eric



[1] http://forum.icann.org/lists/4gtld-base/msg00007.html