Re: [alac] Suggested response to sTLD RFP

[Vittorio Bertola <vb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 29 Aug 2003 11:15:04 +0200, you wrote:

>See <http://blog.lextext.com/blog/_archives/2003/8/15/1374.html> for
>some insights into the amount of money being burnt by a new gTLD
>registry in the current environment.  In that context, a $ 50,000
>application fee is small change.

This is true if what you are planning to set up is a general purpose
unrestricted TLD. However, if you were to set up a small sponsored TLD
for an uniform community, you might easily set it up on a few Linux
boxes with open source software and a simple management interface...
you wouldn't need registrar interfaces (you wouldn't need registrars!)
or huge customer care services, for example.

Moreover, on the Internet (contrarily to previous telecommunication
systems) most services have usually started as a small, amateurish
no-profit enterprise, mostly based on volunteer work made in spare
time, and then, as demand grew, they turned into professional and well
funded companies (or they disappeared, and there's nothing bad with
this too). In some cases, they even managed to grow to the level of a
medium ccTLD, without losing their volunteer status (see for example
the eu.org registry, which is up and running faultlessly since 1996 or
so).

If we get rid of the idea that ICANN is the central planner of the
Internet (at least for the addressing part), so everything that ICANN
approves must be rock solid and lasting forever, and get back to the
simpler but more effective idea of competitive trial-and-error on the
market, I think we can start to understand that there could be plenty
of new TLDs started on volunteer work, where the application fee might
actually be the major non-sunk cost - and some of them might actually
bring forward new ideas and have a significant impact on the DNS.
-- 
vb.                  [Vittorio Bertola - vb [at] bertola.eu.org]<---
-------------------> http://bertola.eu.org/ <-----------------------