Report on Past TLD Launches

“New gTLD Program: Benchmarking of Registry Operations”
ICANN commissioned this report, which benchmarks registry operations and reviews previous TLD launches. The study was led by Barak Ravid (now at Ernst & Young) and John Matson (now at Architelos).
http://www.icann.org/en/topics/new-gtlds/benchmarking-report-15feb10-en.pdf