ICANN has already collected $350 million in new TLD application fees. And that number will grow.
One of the mysteries of ICANN’s new top level domain process is why it’s been so shy about releasing the total number of applications received so far. It released the number of application system registered users, but not the number of applications.
That just changed: ICANN announced it had 2,091 applications completed or in progress when it took the application system down for security issue. ICANN says there are another 214 potential applications for which payments had not been received or reconciled.
ICANN has already collected $350 million in application fees. That means even its “high” budget scenario released this week is too low.
ICANN will collect well more money per application than it needs to cover historical costs. It also means we’re probably looking at five or more batches of top level domains within the digital archery system.
This may be a very bad thing for ICANN. I can see senators’ phones ringing right now.
“They’ve got how much money?”
Duane Higgins says
Im looking for over 3000 in first batch. I think many firms realized at the end that they didnt want to miss this round. With the next round being possibly years away and the applications opening for another week or so, I suspect the numbers will rapidly climb for that period.
John Berryhill says
I’m not sure how you are getting five batches out of this, given the strong likelihood of a lot of duplicate strings.
I would guess that over 25% of all of them are duplicates, with the .brands being the only thing keeping the proportion that low.
Andrew Allemann says
@ John Berryhill
True, if 25% of them are duplicates, then we’re probably looking at 3 batches. Actually a little over that, but I imagine ICANN would squeeze them in to 3.
DSLster2 says
Suckers – every last one of them. Enough said.