ICANN has turned down the proposal to provide fee relief for registries of new gTLDs. As was reported earlier, the Registries Stakeholder Group (RySG) brought forward this initiative in March. At the moment, every registry of new gTLDs pays an annual fee of $25,000 to ICANN. RySG suggested the sum be cut by 75% for about 900 struggling domain zones with only a few registrations.
This would mean that the annual revenue of ICANN could fall by $16.87 million. At the same time, as Domain Incite notes, ICANN has a fund for dealing with technical and legal disputes related to the launch of new domains. Over the past five years, ICANN has not faced any of the serious problems that were expected at the beginning of the New gTLD Program. The fund, which contains over $96 million, could be used to compensate for the lost earnings if the fees were lowered.
ICANN, however, considered this solution premature. Akram Atallah, president of the Global Domains Division, said that the corporation does not yet know how much it will need to spend in the future and therefore will not use the fund. This means that the fees will remain the same for all registries.
