The World Will ICANN Do with $100 Million Cash Next Year? — What in

Can ICANN handle 9 figures of cash?

$185,000 per application. Let’s say 550 applications for fresh to level domain names. That’s $101.75 million in cash coming in ICANN’s door next year.

That’s a lot of money.

What will it do with the cash that it doesn’t immediately spend on application processing? How much of this will now be considered “cost recovery”? How much will be reserved for resulting lawsuits?

Don’t get me wrong, I think it ought to cost a lot to apply for a fresh TLD in this round. It will help ensure applicants are well funded.

But we could see a lot of applications. Think regarding IDN equivalents alone. And a lot of marketing departments of sizable firms will say “Hey, I don’t know if we want one of these. But for under $500,000 we may as well protect ourselves.”

One hundred million in cash. That’s a lot of dough. Hope they don’t screw this up.