Domain Incite reported on an interesting study conducted by an analytical company Analysys Mason commissioned by ICANN. Experts at Analysys Mason estimated how much the world economy has lost due to insufficient support of the new generic top-level domains (gTLD) and internationalized domain names (IDN). Different methods were used to assess this. For example, in case of the new gTLDs researchers used the recent study conducted by .CLUB registry, which showed that around 13% of all webpages still don't support redirecting to the new gTLDs.
The total number of email addresses that use new gTLDs is about 152 million; annual income generated by using each email address is estimated at about US$360. Having these numbers, researchers calculated the lost profits of the world economy due to incomplete support of gTLDs. Experts at Analysys Mason even cut this amount in half. Nevertheless, the final amount – US$3.6 billion – is very significant.
Another method was used to IDNs. Researchers estimated the number of people who speak languages of the five largest language groups (Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, as well as languages of the Arabic countries and India) and who still don't have constant Internet access. They later supposed that the wide development of internationalized domain names would stimulate at least 5% of them to become active Internet users. In absolute numbers it's 17 million people, whose Internet activity could have generated additional 6.2 billion dollars.
Therefore, insufficient support and development of the new and internationalized domain names cost the world economy almost 10 billion dollars. The accuracy of the calculations could obviously be something to question; however, the researchers themselves call their results “conservative” and assume that the real amount could be much greater.
