The Road to Wellington (I)
There's an ICANN meeting in New Zealand starting at the end of next week. I'm a member of ICANN's Board of Directors.
One issue I've been talking to people about is new gTLDs (generic top level domains). It seems to me that the direction ICANN takes on the rollout of new gTLDs should be informed by the numbers - how many entities/people really want to open up one of these things? If the answer is in the 1000s, that should be relevant to the process ICANN decides to follow. If the answer is in the 10s, that should also be relevant.
I can't tell whether the answer is in the 1000s, 100s, or 10s. I'm not sure how to find out, so I'm just going to ask. How many of you out there would like to run a new TLD? Assume a reasonable application fee and a reasonable length of time between now and when you open up for business. Let me know, either through an intermediary or directly — on the comments to this blog, or by email to scrawford at scrawford dot net. The answers I get clearly won't be at all exact, but they may give me (I'm only one board member out of 15) a sense of the scale of the efforts needed.
Thanks.