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Questions to the Board from the ALAC: (Please reply no later than Monday 1 October 2018)

The community is making a very significant time and effort investment  in developing procedures for additional gTLD rounds (or whatever the process will be).

Is it evident that the benefits incurred from the first round were worth the effort expended, and that there are sufficient benefits from going forward to justify additional rounds?

Should we not learn something from what was actually beneficial to the Internet Community (and not just investors or the domain industry) and not just critique the process followed?

It is understood that there may be a pent-up demand for .brand TLDs and perhaps .geonames. But opening a round for them would be trivial compared to the exercise we are embarked on now.

Moreover, how will the decision of whether or how to release new gTLDs factor in a financial analysis from ICANN’s perspective. It is pretty clear that the new TLDs are not the massive operational revenue source that was originally imagined and contracted parties are looking at lowering their costs, regardless of the actual operational cost to ICANN. Within the PDP, there still seems to be a general belief that the program should be cost-recovery and not contribute to operational funds.

Is this sustainable?