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, jo...@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly
