Many of the LLCs are shell companies. In particular, basically every instance of "Adjective Noun, LLC" (e.g, "Foggy Sky, LLC", "Little Station, LLC", "Baxter Hill, LLC"...) is a shell owned by donuts.co, and "Charleston Road Registry" is a shell owned by Google!
Old news, see story on Donuts.inc [1] for example. Lots of people pooled money to create a gTLD registry, it is nominally free money. Cost of hosting 24 servers (one for each time zone) which can handle millions of DNS lookups per second is pretty small (like $100K/year all up, less if you use part time/contract systems folks) You can get 10G links with 100M commit pretty cheaply and if you get more traffic its because you've got more domains so that cost scales with profit. Vs $10/year so once you get 10,000 domains you're break even. Pretty easy math.
It's expensive to squat though, isn't it? I read somewhere that just the application fee is 150,000 USD. Wonder if they will really recover that kind of spend.
Interesting to see a few TLD's in Chinese, Japanese, even Arabic and Hindi.
Winners of the auctions compensate the losers, so it may be possible to game the bidding and lose several auctions, then buy some domains for almost nothing out of pocket. But I'm not sure if payouts from lost auctions can be used to reduce the entry fees... it's probably still a pretty controlled game.
$150k isn't really that expensive. I know it is simple math but I think it would be pretty easy to find 1,500 companies from around the world that would pay $100/year for a domain.
Change that 1,500 one order of magnitude and there's a lot of profit to be made. 15k registrations wouldn't be that hard.
"I know it is simple math but I think it would be pretty easy to find 1,500 companies"
Not really true (I'm in this business for a long long time). First you'd have to market to a much larger pool of companies to end up with 1500 buyers (I'll take your math to be correct for the purpose of my comment by the way..) To market to those companies will cost big dollars. How are you going to do it? Direct mail? Web ads? Pay per click?
In order to sell TLD's you have to be in the path of existing registrars that control the market. One of those of course is godaddy for example. Not easy to get shelf space there.
You got me thinking.. what about Kickstarter? For example, let's say we wanted .hacker. Someone with some rep in our community could start a Kickstarter to do this, no?
Ah, that sucks. I thought I read elsewhere on this thread about losers being "compensated."
That said, if it was just $10-20, I'd be up for contributing to such a Kickstarter even with the proviso it might not work out. Getting 15,000+ people to feel the same might well be difficult though..
I saw the business plan for one of these companies, registered in Gibralter. Not sure if it got the ones it wanted. They were looking for investors on hugely optimistic takeup figures.
That Asociación puntoGAL are from Spain. It will be for sites with content in galician, a lenguage with common roots with portuguese. It is usually funded with public funds and at the end it is used for the politic photo/propaganda.
Here in Spain we have .cat for catalonian too. There were some blogs on .cat that moved to .com because, you know, they wanted to be found and read.
"LLC" is still associated with small, unreliable companies... For what it's worth, Chrysler and GM are LLCs, as are many other large companies. It's just easier to set up and manage.
Their business plan is to rake it in on all the high-value domains before the squatters get to it. Won't matter how stupid your TLD is, you know "coke.stupidtld" and "ford.stupidtld" and a thousand others are a guaranteed sell.
COLLEGE >> XYZ.COM, LLC
UNIVERSITY >> Little Station, LLC
VODKA >> Top Level Domain Holdings Limited (those guys have quite a few such as "COOKING" and "FISHING")
It used to be that you had to squat the web one domain name at the time, now you can just squat a whole TLD!