Dear Bill,

I find it commendable, that you are putting time and effort into the
project to extend the number of languages. In general I'm all favour for
supporting minorities. In the case of TLDs, however, I wonder if this
effort is really making any difference in practise.

If a language only has 100,000 speakers, how many of them would likely
register a domain name under a non-ASCII TLD? Already now the number of
domain registrations in IDN TLDs is much lower than for ASCII TLDs. And
even for ASCII TLDs the number of people registering domains is not very
high. I compared some figures and found that the number of domains in
respect to the population is 0.1% (for some arbitrary TLDs I checked,
this is of course not a representable research). For IDN TLDs the number
is likely to be much lower. But even with 0.1% and a population of
100,000, this would lead to 100 domain registration ... for an ASCII TLD.

I honestly doubt that interest in applying for such TLDs would be high,
if the expected number of domains remains below 100.

Finally, speakers of such a language are not per se excluded from
applying for a TLD in their language. Just a small percentage of words
would be excluded (namely those having a letter that is not already in
our repertoire).

Together with the fact (as Sarmad just said) that for each of those
additional languages we need to find positive evidence for their
inclusion, I would prefer to keep our threshold at 1,000,000.

Cheers,

Michael

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