It seems hard to justify multi-millions to review these applications, when there are earlier intimations that they will only approve less than a dozen. That is, the entry barrier effectively serves to prevent access not only for the consumer oriented interests in the richer nations, but also for almost all interests, commercial or not, in the poorer parts of the world. Otherwise, we risk proving yet again the old adage that the rich get richer. And, many applications involve more than one string. Paul Garin's Name.
Space asks for the most strings.
There are several non-commercial TLD applications, and several applications that compete for the same strings. There are only 2 applications for .web, one of which asked for three strings. There is one .union application, and one .museum application. Novell is seeking .dir. Nokia is seeking eight TLD strings, including mobile.