ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee is “deeply concerned” about the credibility of the new gTLD program’s Next Round, after a scheme to broaden the geographic spread of applicants has started to look like a failure.
The GAC and ALAC are calling for ICANN to address urgently what is sees as flaws in its Applicant Support Program, which offers deep discounts on application fees to small businesses in non-developed countries and to non-profit applicants.
GAC chair Nicolas Caballero and ALAC chair Jonathan Zuck said governments are “deeply concerned about the program’s current trajectory, particularly given the limited time remaining in the application window and the disproportionately low representation from underserved regions”.
ICANN said last week that it has approved the first three ASP applicants. One applicant is from Europe and two are from the Asia-Pacific region.
The latest monthly stats, dated July 23, show that only five applications were classified as “Submitted & in Review”, while 25 were “Initiated” and 26 were “In Draft”. By geography, 10 potential applications come from Africa, 16 from Asia-Pacific, four from Europe, 19 from North America and just two from Latin America.
Caballero and Zuck wrote (pdf):
we also identified a geographic imbalance from ICANN’s data… despite seven months of outreach, potential applications from North America (33%) vastly outnumber those from the LAC region (3%), raising questions about the inclusivity of the program.
…
we really think that the ASP is not merely a procedural requirement but a cornerstone of the Next Round’s credibility. At minimum, failure to address its structural challenges risks perpetuating the dominance of well-resourced entities, undermining ICANN’s multistakeholder principles. We kindly request the Board to treat this matter with the urgency it demands
They want ICANN to conduct a fast review of why the geographic balance is tilted towards North America at the expense of Latin America, Asia and Africa.
As I’ve previously noted, the North America region by ICANN’s definition is small. It doesn’t even include Mexico. Small businesses from the USA and Canada don’t qualify for the ASP and the only other places in the region are US island territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam.
The GAC and ALAC want to know whether the low uptake elsewhere is due to ICANN’s lack of local outreach, complexities in the application process, or costs. Why are draft applications not being submitted?
With the clock ticking down to the November 19 closure of the application window, The August 15 letter calls for ICANN to figure out what’s going wrong and let it know by August 22 — this coming Friday.
Even if it wasn’t August, and we weren’t talking about ICANN, that’s a pretty tight deadline.
Domain Incite replies on support from readers like you to survive. Please consider making a one-off or recurring donation via PayPal. Please support Domain Incite, the independent source of news, analysis and opinion for the domain name industry and ICANN community.