essen> I saw something online that said $250,000 but that didn't make essen> sense if its all paperwork.
woody> Heh. I see you are unfamiliar with ICANN. They've said that woody> same paperwork is likely to cost $375k in ICANN staff time for woody> the next round. Because, you know, inflation or something. And $250k was not really the cost last time either. By the time you did legal fees, deposits, fees, NOC, etc. it was closer to $500k per TLD. If there is similar inflation on all the extra costs, that probably means $600-700k next time. I've been surprised that none of the folks that got TLDs seem to be leveraging the technical/security brand protection like they could. If I have an LG TV and it wants to update to <mumble>.LG and LG is DNSSEC signing the whole chain, that sure seems more likely to be legit than <mumble>.lg.tv or some such. Add in that if you do brand, short of the root zone dumping you for some reason, you own your experience and your full resolution chain. You can pick who/how/where for all the labels, servers, anycast infra, etc. But I haven't seen a lot of interest in taking advantage of that added potential layer of security.
