Sivasubramanian Muthusamy ha scritto:
So I wouldn't really generalize by saying that it is wrong on the part of ICANN to have decided to charge a fee. At the same time, ICANN could also consider either a case to case basis waiver of all or part of the fees, or even think of categories of fees for new domain names - for instance commercial corporations with a commercial domain name allocation business plans charged a higher fee, non-profits a subsized fee or a fully waived fee.
I think that this would be a good solution, but let me make one more point: these fees really seem to be artificially high, much higher than the actual cost of evaluating the applications ($185'000 * 500 applications = $92.5 million; the cost of processing application is almost entirely made by people's time to examine them; with $92.5 million, even in developed countries, you can hire 2000 people for a year, at $46'250/person/year, or 1000 people at $92'500/person/year; do you really need all those people??) I wouldn't really say that we need ICANN to find subsidies for non-profit applications - I would say that we just need ICANN to keep the fees strictly equal to actual and direct costs, and IMHO the fee would be much lower. Ciao, -- vb. Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu <-------- --------> finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/ <--------