Thanks for these questions – they bring up important points worth clarifying:
1/ Our team has decades of experience launching, managing and scaling over 300 real TLDs including .ORG, .XYZ, .IO, .TV and more. This is no easy task and robust marketing campaigns play a crucial part in successfully scaling these TLDs to where they are today. Additionally, our co-founders have formerly owned and operated portfolios with over 10 million .COM/.NET domains, built successful marketing adtech businesses (Manage.com, sold to NASDAQ: CRTO), and scaled .XYZ from its inception to over 7 million domains registered on its registry in which many Web3 projects consider their home.
Efforts to create a framework for .APE to become a life-long, multi-million dollar source of recurring revenue to the DAO will require a comprehensive and holistic go-to-market strategy focused on product marketing, user education and mass onboarding initiatives. Content plans differ significantly between digital and physical channels, however we plan to work with strategic partners (e.g. GoDaddy, Alibaba, etc) to enable the rapid proliferation of the Ape namespace. A core component of the proposal is to enable the broader accessibility of Ape names to more than just a web3 audience.
Expanding our marketing efforts into mainstream channels increases our addressable audience by more than tenfold. While the spend is material to engage these channels, it is typically directly correlated to a net purchase activity, for which the DAO would benefit from. For example, being able to offer bulk discounts or promotional rebates has a direct impact on buying activity, further entrenching more users into the ApeCoin ecosystem. A few other examples include offering engagement or loyalty campaigns tied to community milestones for increased awareness or distribution of the namespace. Per the proposal, we plan to target at least two to three dollars generated of return per one dollar spent in any performance marketing scenario.
Check out the .INC namespace, which offers its domains for $2,000+ per year with nearly 5,000 registrations which implies a $10M topline. This is one of many examples of how scalable the .APE extension can be with mainstream distribution, amplified by network effects from the ApeCoin community. At a very conservative level, we project .APE to makewhole the cost for this grant in less than 1-2 years of launch, with decades of revenue generation for the DAO given the evergreen nature of this real-world asset.
The nature and intent of this proposal is distinctly different from other prior efforts to create a web3-only namespace, which have limited commercial value and distribution.
2/ It is a common misconception that ICANN is a centralized authority. In fact, their multi-stakeholder model involves a diverse group of participants from various sectors including governments, businesses, technical communities, and civil society which ensures that no single entity controls the DNS and related functions, distributing influence across a global array of stakeholders.
While we acknowledge the application process is comprehensive, this is an accurate reflection of the consideration and effort from thousands of delegates over years and decades that work toward a seamless, freely accessible Internet. Developing new solutions to solving name collisions is great in theory, but in practice currently increases the difficulty to implement these solutions as many still require middleware and third-party software services which can be easily manipulated. In the case of NOTO, it doesn’t solve the issue at all, instead it scores competing name systems with the same extension. It’s unclear how that score is allocated fairly across universally acceptable standards. We believe consensus will be difficult to reach across hundreds, if not thousands, of competing projects which proliferate the major problem of name collision on the broader Internet. The DNS has already solved this issue and is widely adopted by more than 5 billion active users.
3/ Unfortunately, friction will always remain, which is why we’re proposing bringing a seamless, frictionless experience to the ApeCoin community by offering interoperable .APE names that work out of the box on billions of devices.
No need for specialized software or integrations when the DNS is instantly accessible on any device or browser. Why change what is already working for over 5 billion people on the Internet? 
4/ Our list of auditors include industry leaders like Certik and OpenZeppelin, in addition to the technical teams from our investors including Shima Capital, Lightshift and Maelstrom. The safety of our partners and users alike is a top priority.
5/ Once the AIP is approved, we will launch a dedicated smart contract for Ape Names, which will initially offer users *APE Name Tokens, a form of NFT which offers users a wide variety of Web3-specific utility (including wallet mapping), and will act as expressions of interest to claim a future .APE domain once the TLD application is successfully completed.
