Well, if you want us to talk about lotteries, you should use a different header. :-)
Lotteries have a much more egalitarian prospect to them. You can structure a lottery so that only qualified entities can enter: ones that can show that they can run a TLD with at least six geographically distributed nameservers that have enough bandwidth and so on.
So, what do you put up for lottery? Ask the people who want them. Qualify at least a hundred organizations that want to run a new TLD. Charge them some entry fee that is used only to do the vetting; it should only be around $1000. Quite frankly, you might get a thousand organizations.
Ask each qualified organization to list of up to ten TLDs for which they would want to own the monopoly. Hold lotteries for the 40 TLDs with the highest number of desiring potential owners. Only let those who said they were interested (as one of their ten choices) into the lottery for a particular TLD; you don't want the Red Cross, who really only wanted .redcross and .emergency, to be in the lottery for .pr0n or .potato or .pólvora.
Also have lotteries for 10 names in which there were exactly two organizations that wanted them. Each of these lotteries would be a coin toss. This would be a good way to measure if lesser-desired TLDs are actually also worthwhile.
Unless there is a terrible result (that is, more terrible than typical ICANN blunders), repeat the process every year until there is no interest.
Well, if you want us to talk about lotteries, you should use a different header. :-)
Lotteries have a much more egalitarian prospect to them. You can structure a lottery so that only qualified entities can enter: ones that can show that they can run a TLD with at least six geographically distributed nameservers that have enough bandwidth and so on.
So, what do you put up for lottery? Ask the people who want them. Qualify at least a hundred organizations that want to run a new TLD. Charge them some entry fee that is used only to do the vetting; it should only be around $1000. Quite frankly, you might get a thousand organizations.
Ask each qualified organization to list of up to ten TLDs for which they would want to own the monopoly. Hold lotteries for the 40 TLDs with the highest number of desiring potential owners. Only let those who said they were interested (as one of their ten choices) into the lottery for a particular TLD; you don't want the Red Cross, who really only wanted .redcross and .emergency, to be in the lottery for .pr0n or .potato or .pólvora.
Also have lotteries for 10 names in which there were exactly two organizations that wanted them. Each of these lotteries would be a coin toss. This would be a good way to measure if lesser-desired TLDs are actually also worthwhile.
Unless there is a terrible result (that is, more terrible than typical ICANN blunders), repeat the process every year until there is no interest.