Reading ICANN’s gTLD Budget: Good News for Applicants

I’ve been reading through some of the raft of documents ICANN released earlier this week. Among them is ICANN’s New gTLD Program Budget, which contains good news for new gTLD applicants.

ICANN reveals that it expects just 5% of applications to fail the initial evaluations, and another 5% to request refunds prior to the end of the evaluation stage. This means that they’re intending to pass approximately 90% of the applications — in other words, ICANN’s intent is not to fail applications by finding trivial faults, but rather to simply make sure that they’re operationally and financially sound. That is excellent news.

ICANN also reveals what it expects from the gTLD application round. Among the highlights:

• ICANN estimates 500 applications. The don’t estimate the number of duplicate or conflicting applications, but if we suppose that 25% are in conflict, that would leave us with approximately 425 unique TLDs applied for. Subtracting a further 10% who drop out, that leaves 382 new TLDs that we can expect to see delegated.
• ICANN expects the majority of gTLD applications to be “straightforward,” with no need for complicated and time-consuming procedures. More good news for applicants.
• ICANN expects the Independent Objector to file objections in less than 5% of the total applications. Again, ICANN’s intent does not seem to be to find fault.

It’s good to see these numbers from ICANN, which shows that they want their program to succeed with a full complement of new gTLDs. 382 of them, by my reading.