not really ICANN approves .XXX red-light district for the Internet

Sun Mar 27 21:50:31 UTC 2011

>> Arithmetic, mostly.  There are 40,000 co-ops in the United States,
>> 160,000 in Europe, and apparently several million world-wide, yet
>> there are only 6700 domains in .COOP.  I would find it hard to say
>> that under 3% takeup was significant support.
>
> Do you attach any significance to the restriction that the .coop operator has 
> to use non-cooperatives as sales channels and the primary means of relations 
> with cooperatives as registrants?

No.  They knew about that when they applied.

The application for .COOP is archived on the ICANN web site.  They 
predicted with "90% confidence" that they'd have over 100,000 
registrations within four years and with "50% confidence" that they'd have 
300,000 registrations.  They failed.

> Note, that cooperatives with registrations in the legacy monopoly name spaces 
> could be, but are not, accounted for revenue purposes, as .coop registrants.

Hmmn, counting people who've decided not to use .COOP as indications of 
support for .COOP.  That's very creative.  You sure you don't work for 
ICANN?

> The Nominalia issue is one registrar. The .cat name space has been available 
> for only 5 years, the .hk and .ch name spaces since 1986. The rate of growth 
> for .cat has been 10k/yr for each of five years, and assuming no changes, 
> will reach the relative densities of western European national name spaces.

Actually, if you look at the registry reports, there was a burst of about 
18,000 domains in .CAT the first year, the annual growth rate has been 
considerably less than 10K/yr and it is if anything slowing down.  From 
the Nov 10 report, the most recent one ICANN has published, to today, the 
growth is about 1000, which extrapolates to under 3500/yr, so it'll catch 
up with the nearby ccTLDs several centuries from now, if ever.  I can't 
find the business plan of the .CAT application on ICANN's web site, but 
I'd be pretty surprised if it predicted numbers anywhere near that low.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly