--On Saturday, July 13, 2013 16:28 +0000 John Levine
<johnl(_at_)taugh(_dot_)com> wrote:
I guess I'm missing something. How exactly is having a gTLD
going to bring in the Big Bucks? Do people actually type
addresses into the address bars on their browsers any more,
or do they just type what they're looking for into the search
bar?
Let's just say you're not allowed to ask that question, any
more than you can ask a fundamentalist Christian how he knows
he's going to heaven.
Noel asked at least two different questions. One is not
supposed to ask either of them, whether your analogy is
appropriate or not. (And see my note from yesterday.)
You are definitely not allowed to look at the history of .AERO,
.TRAVEL, .JOBS, .ASIA, .MUSEUM, .COOP, .MOBI, .TEL or .PRO.
One could quibble about that list -- I'd think about deleting
one or two that actually met the rather narrow expectations for
them and maybe add a few others that didn't. But, yes, the
track record of big profits from selling names out of new gTLDs,
especially if "defensive registrations" are excluded, has been
abysmal.
As far as I know, the only completely successful business model
for post-2001 new gTLDs that were not intended as a service for
a restricted community has involved an extreme form of the
"encourage defensive registrations" model, so extreme that
others have described it as "extortion".
john