Yes, indeed your .02 is correct, correct as of the standpoint of a person from a richer developed country living in San Antonio USA. For me, I understand that as a person in a rich developed country like Singapore. It is not a hot dog stand, really. But for a developing country, do you think that a 1Million dollars for IDNs makes any sense? they might as well train the population to read English! Better value for money! Or save a million kids from some horrible infectious disease. And for IDNs, well, if we have to run it, we can only afford 90K. Won't you consider this correct too? from their standpoint. For such a developing country, you want them to run a one million dollar operation for a few tens of thousands of IDNs, it is simply just not cost effective. So they might as well back off. And then, what is the point for me to invent IDNs and advocate it for the past 12 years? For rich countries to take over and make more money out of the poor? Let's take a positive approach to things. Accept that the digital divide exists. Linguistic, technical and financial barriers exist. That's the reality of today's world. So to promote some desperately needed mutual understanding, especially for those who don't know enough English for them to argue successfully in the ICANN forum or in this mailing list forum, can you guys not consider their fate, just for a moment? To you, TLD operator/registry is gTLD, loads of money involved. Shouldn't you care more than 2 cents worth about the poor left-out countries. So it took ICANN a decade to implement the IDN market, lump it with lucrative gTLDs, and now to arrange it such that only developed country entities can afford it. And then to hear it announce to the world, we are bringing multilingualism to the Internet world, presumably for the rich to make more money, make more money off the poor? the non-English speaker native speaker? locked out of the Internet because of inadequacy of reading English characters? If it is only myself that feels outraged, than I feel really sorry for the Internet community. Maybe, it is time for me to leave. So if you want to do new ASCII gTLDs, go ahead and do the 1M operation with CEOs with loads of bonuses, best practices, ISO9000 certified etc etc. But for the poorer developing world who needs IDNs, can ICANN consider waivers and aid to help run "proper" non-hot dog stand registries, or consider a more realistic level of operations that is a little bit better than a hot dog stand, maybe $100,000 a year operation. Please? for decency's sake? On 3/18/2010 9:48 PM, Jorge Amodio wrote: >> Let's round it to $90,000 a year for a properly run registry. > > This is completely unrealistic and off by at least an order of > magnitude if you want to run a real/serious registry. You really need > to review the technical and operational requirements to be/run a TLD. > > A registry/TLD operator is not a hot dog stand. > > My .02 > Jorge