The Registries Stakeholder Group (RySG) wrote a letter to ICANN management asking to bring down the financial load of the new generic top-level domains (gTLDs). At the moment registries of gTLDs pay $25,000 annually to the ICANN, 6250 dollars every quarter. RySG offers to reduce quarterly payments to $4687.5. Therefore, the annual fee will be 18750 dollars. Moreover, RySG solicits the allocation of US$3 million from the ICANN’s special funds for advertisement and promotion of the new domains.
The reason for the appeal is simple: financial and quantitative indicators of many new domain zones leave much to be desired. The number of registered domain names in many gTLDs doesn’t exceed five thousand, which means that each name costs the registry US$5 per year. In addition, registries pay ICANN for transactions as well (registration of names, their renewal or transfer). In case the number of transactions exceeds 50 thousand per year, each subsequent transaction costs an extra of US$0.25.
RySG letter doesn’t explain whether they are talking about all new generic top-level domains without exceptions. If so, then considering that the number of delegated new domains is over 1200, by only lowering the fees ICANN will lose about 23 million dollars annually. However, it is unlikely that these measures will affect dot-brands, for instance, since from the beginning they were not meant to be making money on domain name registration.
