Bruce, Rafik - for your information few facts of live. Starting IDN ccTLD open up the same issues as one starts gTLD: TM protection, sunrise, hiring expensive legal guys, deals with local authorities, making sure you have community support and operations in place. All of this - a lot of money if cc applicant is not trying to cover bad operations with "national sovereignty". To date we've invested about $600.000 in the registry and systems (go EPP) and about $500.000 (including $26.000 Fast track fee) in SG&A costs. Differences in requirements for ccTLD and gTLD applicants are well known, but they are not about budgets if registry plans to go beyond 10.000 second level domains. And here we go with Adrian's question: "I am struggling to understand why everyone NEEDS a domain name even". And Alan's point: "If we cannot come up with examples of TLDs that stick out as "really good things" that can attract support, perhaps you are right and they don't "need" them. But I suspect that there will be examples, particularly IDNs, where the case will be a lot easier to make." My believe there will be failures and there will be success stories. And until we seed first few (IDN) gTLDs focused on local communities or businesses - we will never know. Damn right - .xxx will cover all costs. What about .дети? (.child in Russian) There is only one way to know: launch it and see how it goes. --andrei
-----Original Message----- From: owner-council@gnso.icann.org [mailto:owner-council@gnso.icann.org] On Behalf Of Bruce Tonkin ...
Note that the application fee above only covers the evaluation of the string. Whereas the policy for new gTLDs requires technical and operational evaluation, along with mechanisms for rights protection mechanisms etc. The legal costs and economists around new gTLDS have also been far greater (millions) - so the more the community demands with respect to work on new gTLDs, the higher the costs for ICANN that need to be recovered in some way.
Once a string is selected, then an IDN-ccTLD goes through the normal IANA ccTLD delegation process - which is essentially proving that the applicant has the support of the local community. (it is a little like the community evaluation component of the new gTLD process where there is contention between applicants). There are some technical tests applied before a ccTLD is placed into the root, and generally I believe that IANA does some due diligence on the technical capabilities of the applicant.
Regards, Bruce Tonkin