The part that I think might put a damper on the breadth of interest in this, if not the depth of interest: the $185,000 is an
"evaluation fee."
Even if you withdraw your application before a decision on your application is reached by ICANN, you may see as little as 20% of that $185k fee come back your way, depending on when you rescind your application.
From the "Applicant Guidelines:"
Quote:
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Refunds -- In certain cases, refunds of a portion of the evaluation fee may be available for applications that are withdrawn before the evaluation process is complete. An applicant may request a refund at any time until it has executed a registry agreement with ICANN. The amount of the refund will depend on the point in the process at which the withdrawal is requested.
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Setting aside the "in certain cases" caveat (which is troublesome by itself, IMO), the document goes on to explain that if you withdraw your application within 21 calendar days from the issuance of a GAC Early Warning, you get 80% of your $185k back.
If you wait until you receive some manner of meaningful response from ICANN (and it will be
far from a definitive yes/no) with respect to your application, after ICANN has posted the applications but before they have published their Initial Evaluation results, your refund amount drops to 70% of the evaluation fee.
Wait a step longer, until after ICANN has published the Initial Evaluation results, and your refund drops to 35%. (This is the stage in which you start to get a better idea if your application is going to get anywhere and you're already in for $120,250.00 just by reaching it.)
The last stop on the refund train is after you have completed the Dispute Resolution, Extended Evaluation and/or String Contention Resolution phases, at which point you can back out and still get 20% of your $185k back.
If you enter into a registry agreement with ICANN, and find a deal-killer through the contract negotiations process, then you get nothing back from your application fee. That arguably makes sense, though, and my hunch is that anybody who gets this far is very unlikely to back out, anyway. (It's also pretty consistent with how the process for sTLDs has worked in the past.)
The bottom line is that to even be considered as an applicant, you have to fork over at least $37k that is never coming back to you, and you won't even be close to knowing whether you will eventually be rewarded with the TLD you seek until you have seen another $83,250.00 flow from your 'deposit' into the ICANN coffers.
Given all that, I think it's safe to say that this is going to be a possibility limited to companies and individuals who have fairly significant resources to commit to the
possibility of owning a gTLD, and well outside the reach of the "casual speculator," for lack of a better term.