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Chehade hopes for lower round two gTLD fees

Kevin Murphy, August 16, 2013, 09:24:12 (UTC), Domain Policy

ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade has said he hopes that new gTLD application fees will be lower in the second round.
Speaking to Marketplace in a brief audio interview yesterday, he said:

As we go to round two, which everyone is clamoring for us to open, we will reassess the costs. We are a non-profit and therefore if the learnings from this first round lead us to a different fee — and I hope personally a lower fee so more people can participate — we will adjust that as we go.

The fees in the current round were $185,000, though the refund schedule means only successful applicants pay the full fee.
I’ve heard a couple of murmurings recently — nothing concrete as yet — that the cost of the program is actually running quite close to the original expectations that set the fee at $185,000.
Many applications have been withdrawn very close to the deadline for receiving their full pre-Initial Evaluation result refund, when one assumes that most of the IE costs have already been incurred.

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Comments (5)

  1. zack says:
    August 16, 2013 at 11:18 am

    Well…they should go down by at least $25k per application…I think that was the historical cost recovery component of the $185k.
    Although I expect they will do some “analysis” and say that it ended up costing them more than the $185k we paid!!

    Reply
  2. John Berryhill says:
    August 16, 2013 at 4:30 pm

    We haven’t reached the “everybody sues ICANN” phase of the process yet.

    Reply
  3. Avri Doria says:
    August 17, 2013 at 4:20 pm

    Since I beleive the next round should be a remedial round to provide opportunities for developing economy communities that were never really offered in this round, I think fees, perhaps on a sliding scale, should be as much as $185K lower.

    Reply
  4. Avri Doria says:
    August 17, 2013 at 5:06 pm

    Ps.
    And after the remedial round, I do not see a need for further rounds, but rather think that the pent up demand will have been exhausted and we can move to a rolling applications process, as was envisaged by the GNSO originally. We have to remember that one or two round were only necessary to alleviate pent-up demand and not as important in itself.
    Rounds and all of the insane mishigas that violated the first principle* of the new gTLD program that has come with it will quickly become a qweryism.
    —
    *
    New generic top-level domains (gTLDs)
    must be introduced in an
    orderly,
    timely and
    predictable way.

    Reply
  5. Nigel Roberts says:
    August 19, 2013 at 9:33 am

    John
    Ain’t gonna happen.
    Unless you know different 😉

    Reply

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