It costs ~$200,000 to apply for a TLD, and there's an ongoing renewal cost in the tens of thousands of USD.

For this application round, ICANN is running an Applicant Support Program, or ASP. The applicants seeking to apply for a TLD this round who qualify for the ASP will have a substantially reduced application fee, among other benefits. Our organization is one such org who has qualified for the ASP so we will not have to pay the full $227,000 application fee.

How much is the reduced fee then? As I understand it's somewhere between 75-85% less, which is still a lot of money.

Also, who is paying for the reduced fee, administrative and infra costs? And have you actually submitted gTLD application, or are you trying to crowdfund? Unclear to me.

The fee will fall on us to pay and the gTLD application window is open and our application is in progress. Yes we are crowdfunding (there is a donation link on our website and in the pamphlet) while also actively seeking partners to sponsor us.

If anybody is asking you "are you trying to crowdfund" and your answer is "yes,", you've clearly failed at conversion, marketing and UX design.

90+% of people who would be willing to sponsor this stuff will go "hmm, I wonder where they've taken their money from, not us I guess." Not everybody reads comments, even fewer post ones of their own.

Being on the front of HN is a great opportunity, I'm afraid you haven't used yours as well as you possibly could.

It's usually the clever cunts that try to deceive the investor by deploying an arsenal of marketing tactics. At least the organization in this case, is clear upfront.

That's definitely not a cartel then.

Thanks for sharing. Although 'Boromir' and 'One does not simply' should absolutely be a match!

“There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses.” ― Bjarne Stroustrup

There's an expansion port on the front with a camera interface, so you could add on better AR cameras.

There's an expansion port on the front with a camera interface, so you could add on better AR cameras.

I think it's tongue-in-cheek.

The finances work the other way around: you can often pay your transit/upstream providers an additional fee for their DDOS protection/filtering service, where you can signal (via BGP or otherwise) that there's traffic you don't want to receive. BGP Flowspec (or similar) is one of the technologies used here.

Yep, absolutely, often called "wave/wavelength" or "lambda" service, or "lit fiber".

DWDM tech improvements have outpaced nearly every other form of technology growth, so the same single pair of fiber that used to carry 10 Mbps can now carry 20 Tbps, which is a 2,000,000x multiplier. The same somewhat-fixed supply of fiber can go a very long way today, so the price pressure for access is less than you might expect.

All surface area carries risk, and LLDP is additional surface area when exposed on a public IX.