Arithmetic, mostly. There are 40,000 co-ops in the United States, 160,000 in Europe, and apparently several million world-wide, yet there are only 6700 domains in .COOP. I would find it hard to say that under 3% takeup was significant support.
Do you attach any significance to the restriction that the .coop operator has to use non-cooperatives as sales channels and the primary means of relations with cooperatives as registrants?
No. They knew about that when they applied. The application for .COOP is archived on the ICANN web site. They predicted with "90% confidence" that they'd have over 100,000 registrations within four years and with "50% confidence" that they'd have 300,000 registrations. They failed.
Note, that cooperatives with registrations in the legacy monopoly name spaces could be, but are not, accounted for revenue purposes, as .coop registrants.
Hmmn, counting people who've decided not to use .COOP as indications of support for .COOP. That's very creative. You sure you don't work for ICANN?
The Nominalia issue is one registrar. The .cat name space has been available for only 5 years, the .hk and .ch name spaces since 1986. The rate of growth for .cat has been 10k/yr for each of five years, and assuming no changes, will reach the relative densities of western European national name spaces.
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. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly