Re: [soac-newgtldapsup-wg] New JAS WG members - welcome!

[Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 3/25/11 2:49 PM, Richard Tindal wrote:

> A primary reason the Application Fee is high ($185K) is that the
> Applicant Guidebook (AG) has been crammed full of checks, reviews,
> studies, protections, certifications, security levels, operating
> requirements, etc, etc. At the request of many parties, including the
> GAC and IPC, selection of a Registry operator now involves an enormous
> number of steps and operating a TLD is now quite expensive due to the
> many security, trademark and consumer protections required. I am
> surprised the $185K (set in 2009) has not increased as more and more
> requirements are loaded into the AG.
Agree. There is no way the .aero project on CORE's then 1st generation 
registry platform, or the .coop project on PopTel's 1st generation 
registry platform, or the .museum project on MuseDoma's 1st generation 
registry platform, or the .cat project on CORE's 2nd generation 
platform, could meet the requirements which the Registry Stakeholders 
Group, and ICANN Staff, have developed, in mostly close meetings, 
nominally about "contract terms", but in fact creating a barrier to 
competition. I had to leave each "closed contract terms" meeting in 
every ICANN public meeting since San Juan, that's 12 meetings where 
the SLA and related terms got talked up, and up, and up.
At this point, there is a higher likelihood of success in applying for 
a standard contract and selling generic names and following the 
generally non-competitive, but viable models set by Afilias and 
NeuStar, co-exploiting the pay-per-click monitization of name space 
independent keywords than in attempting to provide a name space for 
public community use.
And let us not forget the perpetual recurring recurring fee, and all 
the additional cost items.
Eric