A few weeks ago during the TAS outage, ICANN issued a statement saying that anyone who applied for a new gTLD or paid to enter the TAS system could pull their application or authorization and get a full refund of any money paid.
Today in a Twitter chat, I asked ICANN how many people requested a refund under this program.
The answer I got was:
“As of last night we had received two new requests for refund since full refund offer, one for $185k & one for $5K”
I’m personally not surprised there has been virtually no takers for a refund.
After waiting for many years, no one in the game is going to leave the game due to a six week delay.
I thought at the time it was a smart move by ICANN to head off lawsuits by simply letting anyone who paid into the system to let them drop out and give them a 100% refund.
Now it seems even smarter.
In other news out of the Twitter chat:
An update on new timeline including the Big Revel will be released on or before May 29th but that the “Target reveal date will still before Prague”
In all ICANN was asked what seemed to be well over 50 questions, they answered 15.
You can see the chat under the Twitter #NewgTLD
You can follow us on Twitter here.
ICANN Applicants are PLAYERS and GAMERS
At this stage, leaving some money in the game allows the players to get invited to all of the insider events. They can still request a 100% refund, once they are part of the deals they want.
ICANN has already stated that they prefer and expect their process to encourage the players to “make deals” rather then endure the gauntlets set up to exhaust players who will not succeed.
The skilled gamers will be the ones who get a refund AFTER the deadlines and ALSO get listed in the Big Reveal. Photo ops at this stage can not be easily undone, but money can still be returned.
There may be two other reasons to stay in the ICANN game at this point.
1. If the U.S. Federal Trade Commission shuts ICANN down one would expect the Applicants would get a 100% refund plus more.
2. If one of the Class Action lawsuits being prepared with Applicants as the “class” strike it rich, one may want to be an Applicant.
The $350,000,000 is some measure of the amount of pent up demand ICANN and the incumbent registries have kept out to the market. Refunds may convince the courts there was not really much demand. Applicants want to keep their money in the game long enough to make it count, and then take the refund and any extra benefits that may come from being part of the process.
The insiders will of course be long gone and claim no responsibility when it all hits the courts.