As an aid to planning, I put together a PDF timeline of milestones and associated costs. This doesn’t include all costs, for instance rent, staff, travel and so on, but it does capture most of the likely and contingent costs associated with the process of getting a new top-level domain through ICANN.

Click the illustration below to download the full PDF (434 KB), which you can print and tape to the front of your 52-inch plasma TV to remind you that you’d better get to work raising some money.

(Click illustration above to download printable PDF)

Explanations:

• At the July 2009 marker, a box says “Bank Balance (~$1M+ ?).” This refers to the ICANN requirement that at the time you submit your application, you must show that you have enough money to operate your proposed registry. Is it $500 thousand? Is it $2 million? I don’t know, but my completely unsubstantiated guess is that $500K is too little and $2M may be overkill. Hopefully ICANN will be clearer about this in the next draft of their Guide, which is due Feb. 2009.
• In general, a question mark means that it’s unclear what it will cost. If there’s a range, I’ve given the range.
• Your costs for lawyers, marketing, etc. will vary according to your means and your goals. I’ve tried to give what I think are likely to be the least you can get away with for a “typical” TLD, whatever that means. In other words, these are my guesses.

A word about consultants — yes, of course I’m tooting my own horn. But, unless you have the time and patience to deal with the minutiae of ICANN, you will need to find someone who can do it for you.

A good consultant can help you plan, budget and anticipate obstacles. More important, he or she can alert you to ICANN rules (or rule changes) that affect your business plan, and help you either promote, block, or amend those rules if possible. Very often it is possible, because ICANN isn’t cognizant of all the implications of their policies, and if you are able to point out a flaw, they can fix it. It’s also important to know which policies are the result of long entrenched battles (forget changing those), and which are relatively new and unexamined (good chance of changing them). So, please, don’t spend $185K on an application which just won’t fly. If you don’t want to hire me, just send me a note, I can recommend other good consultants who know the space.

If you have a question about my compressed notations on the timeline, write to me or leave a comment and I’ll explain.

Tags: ICANN timeline, , ICANN new gTLD, ICANN new TLD, ICANN fees, ICANN consultant, ICANN evaluation, ICANN Guide to New gTLDs