not really ICANN approves .XXX red-light district for the Internet

[johnl at iecc.com (John R. Levine)]

>> No. They knew about that when they applied.
>
> You are mistaken. This was a lively subject of negotiation involving Louis 
> Touton and the parties. I was involved as well. There was real shock when 
> Louis came back from the Registrar Constituency with the message that rather 
> than the initial registrar-free budget of initial registrations, the working 
> number was _0_.

If their application was predicated on ICANN changing the rules, I can't 
feel very sorry for them.  And in any event, it's a bit much to claim that 
the difference between 300,000 registrations and 6400 registrations is 
that people have to find a registrar.  If there were really 293,600 people 
eager to register if they could only find a coopful registrar, I'd 
expect we'd have a few,

>> Actually, if you look at the registry reports, there was a burst of
>> about 18,000 domains in .CAT the first year, the annual growth rate
>> has been considerably less than 10K/yr and it is if anything slowing
>> down. From the Nov 10 report, the most recent one ICANN has published,
>> to today, the growth is about 1000, which extrapolates to under
>> 3500/yr, so it'll catch up with the nearby ccTLDs several centuries
>> from now, if ever. I can't find the business plan of the .CAT
>> application on ICANN's web site, but I'd be pretty surprised if it
>> predicted numbers anywhere near that low.
>
> I'll ask Nacho or Jordi tomorrow morning to comment. You could be right.

It's all in the reports on the ICANN web site, except for the current 
count which I got by grepping the zone file.  No secrets there.

Regards,
John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly