Costs $185,000 to apply to ICANN. And that's just the application fee. Many hurdles to jump through apart from that e.g. you have to employ the services of a registry to actually manage the TLD, have finances in place (and no, bitcoins won't count yet
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Also, we are currently in the middle of launching the new gTLD program at ICANN. There are close to 2,000 new TLDs waiting to be approved / put in the root. This process is likely to take a couple of years. No more applications for new TLDs are being taken under this first "wave" is finished.
As for "rounding up interest" with registrars, you don't need to do that. Registrars will sell all TLDs in the root. They aren't fussy.
First step is to decide whether there is a end-user market for the domain and present a business plan as part of your initial application to ICANN.
Wow, thanks for the info. I know a few people that would be interested in namecoin and .bit due to it's inherent censorship resistance. $185k is a lot for just an application fee, but not untenable if a business case can be made, but I'm glad to know that the process is that bureaucratized.
Seems like that may be much more effort than it's worth. Wonder if there is a way to join bind to namecoind for the purposes of lookups. If enough people implemented bind/named it wouldn't really matter much what ICANN does.