This is the third of a series of articles on new TLDs as a result of interviews with leading industry players. In this article we interview Richard Wein, general manager of the Austrian registry nic.at.

With the closing date for applications for new Top Level Domains delayed one week, there are soon to be a lot of nervous people out there waiting to see if their money and time was well spent in applying for a TLD. One of those is the Austrian registry nic.at, who submitted 11 TLD applications on behalf of clients, easily surpassing their goal of five.

While cities and regions have been quite happy to discuss their plans, special interests have overall been not quite so forward in saying if they will apply. And brand names have been very reticent with fears they will alert their competitors to their intentions, to apply or not.

Brand names such as Google, Unicef, Hitachi, Canon and the Australian ISP iinet have been among the few to say they will apply, while Pepsi and Facebook have said they will not be. But expect a flurry of announcements now that applications are closed.

One of those involved in assisting applicants, and providing registry services, has been the Austrian registry nic.at that developed a package they snappily named Registry In A Box to help would be applicants.

Overall Wein says they were quite successful signing up 11 TLD applicants – .WIEN, .TIROL, .BERLIN, .HAMBURG, .VERSICHERUNG, .REISE, .IMMO, .VOTING, .BRUSSELS, .GMBH and .VLAANDEREN along with one yet unnamed brand name. With an initial target of five, nic.at has exceeded their target.

Nic.at’s general manager Richard Wein believes there will be between 1500 and 2200 TLD applications, somewhat lower than others Domain News has spoken to, but took a similar line on the number he expects to come from brand names, predicting they will be responsible for around 70 per cent of applications.

But Wein did agree business was slow to wake up to the possibilities of TLDs, saying “many big enterprises and brands woke up to the possibilities quite late and realising that the application window will be the last, possibly for quite a few years.”

For successful applicants though, the non-brand TLDs face a significant hurdle. If there are more than 800 successful TLD applicants coming to the market within 12 months or so of one another, and an average registrar nowadays offering up to 50 existing TLDs, Wein sees it as a significant problem for new TLDs to get access to registrants.

“The only way for the new registry operators to get their TLDs ‘to market’ is for them to offer registrars an easy technical way of getting the TLD to market, which would mean no human interaction, as well as sales support and of course an attractive revenue.”

The process for applying for TLDs worked well for nic.at.

“I think it was quite OK,” Wein said. “Of course there is room for improvement, but it is very hard to try to please everyone. That the TAS broke down the last day was very embarrassing and shows one time more that ICANN don’t have the core competency for developing electronic solutions.”

Wein does not think there will be many novel ideas for the use of TLDs from what he has seen. The only one he is aware of is .HIV, but he is unsure as to whether the idea will work. Besides, the TLD .VOTING will create a new namespace for votings and surveys, offering additional tools to their domains Apart from this, all of the applicants Wein has dealt with will run their TLD on a fairly typical registry model.

Wein though has been quite disappointed in how brands have approached the concept of new TLDs, saying they “have no idea how to use this new thing.”