The thing that prevents you is that the winnings don't scale. If there's a $185,000 application fee, then you need to make at least that back. That means that a

The thing that prevents you is that the winnings don't scale. If there's a $185,000 application fee, then you need to make at least that back. That means that at: 2 parties, the winning bid needs to be at least $370,000 4 parties: $740,000 8 parties: $1,480,000 16 parties: $2,960,000 and so on. However, if people go into this simply to game the system, that means that each party needs to be able to bid at least the winning bid (because to make your money back, you need to be able to push the bid to that number), which means for 16 parties, you've now tied up $2,960,000 * 16 = ~ 50 million dollars in cash. And that's only to break even on the application fee. In addition to this, each applicant has to prove that they have the know-how and technical resources to run the gTLD[0]. Finally, the money you submit, will be in escrow for close to 9 months[1], which would make this incredibly infeasible as a money making system. [0] https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/global-support/faqs/faqs-en https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/global-support/faqs... [1] https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/global-support/faqs/faqs-en https://newgtlds.icann.org/en/applicants/global-support/faqs... (section 2.7)