Hi, Evan,

Thank you for your comment.

Indeed, another round of new gTLDs is unlikely to serve the public interest, especially when disregarding the points raised by ALAC and others. However, in economics there is a famous theory saying the "invisible hand beats the visible one". Thus, as there are powerful parties pushing for it, which may also considered as some sort of "demand", our "visible hand" may not be able to stop it.

Nevertheless, there is also a more powerful "invisible hand" which may teach those parties a lesson. That is, the lack of demand of the DNS market place. I suppose there will be much less speculation this time. This is because those speculators are likely to worry if they would be able to sell their inventory to others in today's marketplace. Furthermore, as most of the parked registrations came from China last time, while China's economy is slowing down, there is much less likely that they will have similar enthusiasm for this time.

Thus, let the rule of economics teach them a lesson, which may be much better received than ours.

Kaili

On Mon, Jul 1, 2019 at 11:58 PM Evan Leibovitch <evan@telly.org> wrote:

On Mon, 1 Jul 2019 at 09:10, Barrack Otieno <otieno.barrack@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Kaili,

Could you expound on the statement that the new gTLD market is already saturated?

How many of the last round of gTLDs are really successful? Have any of them met the targets anticipated when they applied?

How did you arrive at this conclusion. We are working hard through dnsforum.africa to grow the market in Africa and would be keen on new perspectives.

That all depends on what your market and objectives are.

If the goal is to sell as many domains as possible without regard for consequences to the public and to entities providing goods and services on the Internet, the field is never saturated and there's always room for more sales.

If, OTOH, your goal is actually growing the use and prosperity of African consumers and businesses using the Internet, your perspective is very different.

- Evan