The usage tells us otherwise.
Web usage and registrations are two very different things because the zone file counts are no longer a reliable metric due to heavy discounting. One of the worst examples was .LOAN. At its peak, it had about 2M registrations. It only had a few hundred developed websites.
So this forced people to use ccTLDs since there were literally no good .com or .net domains available?
Yep. All the good dropping domain names were being taken so people found that it was easier to get the domain name they wanted in their own ccTLD. Even if the ones in .COM/NET were on sale, why pay thousands of Dollars/Euros when the same domain name in the local ccTLD is available for regfee? That's the question that ICANN never asked itself.
That's crazy!
Hard to believe but it would have been worse only for Dell taking legal action against some of the bigger tasting registrars. There are glaciers that move quicker than ICANN.
I guess it was too late as the ball was rolling.
The first new gTLDs from the 2012 round started go live in late 2013 and early 2014. It was a completely different market almost five years after large-scale Domain Tasting had ended. Much of the demand that had been there five years previously was gone because the artificial shortage was gone.
They are stuck at 25 - 26 million.
The zone counts are around 23 million. That number is kept inflated by heavy discounting by the larger new gTLDs. Some of these zones can see over 70% of domain names from the same day's zone from the previous year completely replaced. That's around 70% of the domain names from a zone in 2020 not being present in the same zone/new gTLD for 2021.
Yes, new domain extensions are not used much.
The heavily discounted ones are the worst for web usage. But there are some new gTLDs that actually have relatively good web usage. The thing about web usage is that it is different from the zone file count. Some of the legacy gTLDs and ccTLDs can have web usage in the 30% to 40% range. It depends on the target market and the ecnomics of that market. A strong economy means that more people will be selling to each other online. That's why ccTLDs have higher web usage as most business is local. A gTLD is quite a different case as it is a composite of a lot of country level markets. With .COM, the main market is that of the US so it has strong web usage.
I'm sure Verisign would not that.
There's a lot of politics involved with contract negotiations. Gradual increases tend to be more common with larger gTLDs. The downside for these increases is that they have a worse effect on renewals in less well developed economies. This is the niche that .XYZ and .ONLINE have made their own. In those less well developed economies, the cost of a .XYZ is lower than that of a .COM. At a registrar level, many of these countries have no accredited ICANN registrars so all gTLD registration activity is outsourced to big players like Godaddy, Newfold Digital or Tucows.
Regards...jmcc