Alex Gakuru wrote:
> One finds a number of developing countries' registries equally guilty
> of hesitation in disclosing such their "business" (thus
> 'confidential') information and data. Never mind their much publicised
> 'public interest' purpose of existence. Some even (mis)use this status
> quo as a basis of charging consumers unreasonably high domain
> registrations fees.
>
> To solve this problem, the Consumer Interest Group has been exploring
> a new type of business model (for now just call it "consumer-owned
> registries") where motive for profit is essentially zero! Fees will be
> the closest to actual costs and any surplus income over expenditure
> -all of it! (i.e. no accumulated bank reserves) shall be used to
> promote public interest internet growth in developing regions.
>
> It means that we shall explore ways of impressing upon ICANN to waive
> the 185K, among others. If interested, then please join our mailing
> list where we'll have the conversation started soon.
>
> regards,
>
> Alex
>
>   

Yes Alex - there seems to be two models here. One is the traditional 
model offering public registration and all the complexities associated 
with that. In that model the $185k is justified because the hard part is 
the registrar part.

However - another model is where you are just using the TLD for private 
name resolution and you and not offering public registration but rather 
allowing an organization to use it like a second level domain name. For 
example, .ibm, .microsoft, .google, .catholic, etc. That way - for 
example, instead of going to google.com you can just go to google. In 
this situation the .google TLD would be owned by google and they would 
control it just like they control google.com.

In the second model the TLD is no more complex than running ant other 
standard name server. It would be equivelene to running a "." (nothing) 
TLD where instead of registering .com, .net .org or .info you would just 
register with "."

You would need a registrar to handle the "." TLD.