This law firm wanted $250k up front for the application, told us it could take over 2 years, and did not offer any guarantees that the TLD we wanted would be approved. It's a total scam up and down.
I'm no expert on Handshake, but it has a built in open auction system for registering TLDs. It seems to be the best alternative to the ICANN cabal and an actually decent use case for a blockchain. We bought the TLD we wanted on Handshake, and it cost less than $1,000. If we could only get browsers to support it...