Some random thoughts:

I would assume that a sizable fraction of .city and .geosomething applications were indeed following a superior goods logic. Maybe even some large corporate applications. In itself, this is not bad at all. Vanity business-models are a welcome change from the old business-models.

I view the motivation behind most other applications as high risk-reward low cost endeavors, despite the real costs highlighted by Milton. Meaning they chase the old business models, and not new ones.

Applications by the current domain industry mainly trying to replicate the defensive registration business model is a net cost on them: I don't foresee much reward. Most of them new TLDs are not gonna have any kind of an acceptable payback. No doubt spams n scams and speculation will contribute to a certain volume to successful applicants, though the very idea of expansion should cool down some of the sld-speculation volume the applicants get.

The way I view the expansion is that its many old-business-model applications was a necessary evil to flesh out the few applications intent on finding new business models. Like you say, Google could very much turn this thing on its head. I viewed the 185k as a way to constrain old-business-model seeker's purported spread strategy of diversifying TLD applications, looking for the ones with the high payback compensating for others. (I think some of the old applicants from ICANN's troubled history with alternates were able to apply for free on all the ones they did apply before, right? If that is so, that was an unnecessary evil, whose challenge should have been met squarely before the application process.)

And so for the numbers of application in developing countries, it seems only normal that ― not knowing what innovative business model might come out of this ― there was no point in applying in the hope of benefiting from new-business-model first-movers advantages. That no more than 2 or 3 applications out of Africa did, seems reasonable and expected. I wouldn't have expected many African applications to chase the old business-model, and also comparatively fewer should have been chasing the vanity model.

If the expansion is about finding *some* new business model (and, concomitantly, applications) for domain names, I would still contend that the good way to go was to enable such an expansion since the alternative is, of course, a planned expansion. Such an alternative would be even more messy and would not result in the same level of "attack" on the old business models. Because I still consider that an expansion changes the dynamics of the old models considerably. Defensive registration cannot possibly be made out in every new tld, for instance, which should contribute to depleting the defensive value attached to semantic strings. In other words, I believe that abundance destroy defensive value. At the same time, it destroys some of the stronghold put over languages and meanings by TM and IP. Meaning, that competition on the old business-model will help to scour the old business model.

Nicolas

On 7/13/2012 12:24 PM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
[log in to unmask]" type="cite">On 13 July 2012 11:22, Milton L Mueller <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
> Of course if you and MM are right, and no one in their right mind would
> want one of these things anyway, then it might be a waste of time.

[Milton L Mueller] That is not my position. At all. I see many reasons for a variety of players to have one, and believe that I was advocating that ICANN open the root to new additions since 1996 - before there was an ICANN.

I have always maintained that IDN TLDs in particular refute any claims that there is no need for new TLDs.

I agree. My own position is that while the vast bulk of TLD applications are needless extractions of value from the Internet, a handful are genuinely useful. ESPECIALLY IDNs, there should be at least one (and preferably two or three) in every script.

It will also be useful to have some TLDs that were *truly* based on different business models that did not depend on speculators or defensive registrations, or whose differentiator was more than its string being a new category. I look forward to what Amazon and Google plan to do, since they have far different motives for applying than most of the usual suspects. It will be very interesting to see what happens to the business models of all those speculators if Google maintains the path it has gone in other fields, and starts handing out free second level domains to content providers. Indeed, IMO the only silver lining of the entire gTLD application process is the invitation to the likes of Google to disrupt the domain industry (and possibly destroy much of it).

It will certainly be interesting to see what influence these new players, which dwarf the former "giant" Verisign, exert in the GNSO going forward.

What I am saying is that new TLDs are a species of what economists call a "superior good"; i.e. goods which make up a larger proportion of consumption as income rises. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_good


In the extreme sense also known in the vernacular as a luxury item, a term which I would certainly agree applies to most new gTLDs.

 To expect poorer and developing economies to exhibit as much demand per capita for new TLDs as highly developed and richer internet economies is just not realistic. That will, of course, change gradually over time as these economies catch up, perhaps faster than we think (given the way our own economies seem to be stagnant or sinking). I just don't believe we can or should force-feed it in order to make outcomes conform to unrealistic but ideologically attractive expectations.

I would go a step further and say that most new gTLDs are not just luxury items but deliberate symbols of vanity and status -- adornments that indicate the buyer's ability to afford something that would to most be totally unnecessary (or obviously overpriced). See "conspicuous consumption". 

At a technical level, there's not much you can do with <.foo> that you couldn't do with <.foo.com>. In conversations with applicants over the past few years, I have been amazed by the number of community and geo TLDs whose primary rationale seems to be "we deserve it" as opposed to "we need it", furthering the concept of "TLD as collective status symbol" and without heed of the needs of people who actually use the Internet.

- Evan