II.2.11   Expected Costs Associated with the Operation of the Registry (RFP Section D13.2.11)

The costs expected to be associated with operating the registry are variable with respect to registration volume, SRS queries, Whois queries, innovative designs of the registry, the number of ICANN accredited registrars and the ability to provide the highest levels of service.

Pending further analysis, and in consideration of the unique nature of the .geo application, a market-based cost of $6.00 annual fee per registration is proposed for all forecast probability cases. The cost elements included are described below.

Staffing includes all employee-related expenses, that is, the associated labor, benefits, and administrative support.

Communications includes all bandwidth and capacity requirements at the SRS data centers and the nameserver sites. JVTeam's contracts with multiple communications providers to share its communication lines, rather than being reliant on a single provider. This protects each phase of the system from outage due to a communication provider's backbone outage.

Other Direct Expense including all other anticipated costs with operating the registry including travel, marketing, legal and facilities expense.

Hardware refers to the capital equipment required for the SRS data centers and nameserver sites. This includes, but is not limited to, multiple servers, routers, load-balancing equipment, disk arrays and firewalls.

Software expense captures both the custom and third party software developed and purchased to implement and operate the registry. This covers the creation of XRP, to replace the current flawed RRP platform, while adding feature functionality.

The above assumes that the domain name registry costs associated with a .geo registration are similar to those existing TLDs in the marketplace (query levels, connectivity, system, processing requirements are similar).

The following enumerate the expected costs with operating the .geo registry:

• Staffing: $2.5   10 million
• Server Capacity (Hardware): $19   38 million
• Facilities: $1   4 million
• Communications: $0.4-2.5 million
• Other : $12   26 million

II.2.12   Expected Revenue Associated with the Operation of the Registry

Please refer to Section II.2.5, which describes not only the demand for registry services, but also the expected revenues.