[NCUC-DISCUSS] 2017 ICANN Meetings

[James Gannon]

I would fully support you taking the lead drafting a response for the policy committee to consider!
If possible try to setup a google doc or other collaborate drafting tool to make sure others can assist and give input from across our community.

Fantastic to see you taking something like this up, a shining example of “taking the bull by the horns”!

-James

From: Ayden Férdeline <icann at ferdeline.com<mailto:icann at ferdeline.com>>
Date: Wednesday 16 March 2016 at 8:34 p.m.
To: James Gannon <james at cyberinvasion.net<mailto:james at cyberinvasion.net>>
Cc: Renata Aquino Ribeiro <raquino at gmail.com<mailto:raquino at gmail.com>>, NCUC-discuss <ncuc-discuss at lists.ncuc.org<mailto:ncuc-discuss at lists.ncuc.org>>
Subject: Re: [NCUC-DISCUSS] 2017 ICANN Meetings
Oh, thanks for sharing that, James. How timely!

Has the NCSG or NCUC already drafted a response to the final report recommendations of the Geographic Regions Review Working Group? If not, I'm happy to take the lead here and to draft something up for others to add to.

I've only skim read a few of the recommendations and some seem slightly problematic to me, especially the idea that dependent overseas territories belong to the same region as their home country, unless their mother country agrees otherwise. I am sure that is something the GAC supports but that makes our outreach efforts harder. I already see this being an issue in San Juan. Puerto Ricans might be US citizens but their native language and culture varies from that of the mainland USA. By ICANN's arbitrary definition of North America the region has a very small number of members relative to other regions (8, to Asia/Pacific's 73), yet it is still guaranteed one director and a disproportionate amount of ALAC resources. If Puerto Rico was considered a part of Latin America and the Caribbean, we could bring those from the hispanosphere together and have outreach activities in a language that most from that region would be comfortable communicating in. But we won't be doing that. If the meeting in San Juan goes ahead, we'll mainly be bringing those from the US and Canada to Puerto Rico. Of course we need to do outreach there, too, but I've heard a few people now say this meeting will - by virtue of being in a Spanish-speaking territory - be a form of Latin American outreach. I just don't see how that is the case. By all means have a meeting in San Juan and if we can get additional language support there, great, but I would like it to be acknowledged that this is a North American meeting which will mainly be bringing together native English speakers, and is not a LatAm surrogate.

I appreciate that this is a sensitive issue for ICANN to deal with — it is much easier to defer to a 3rd party's definition of what constitutes a geographical region than to get into the tricky business of defining sovereignty and state self-determination (though I think ICANN already that did in assigning the .cat TLD to Catalonia in 2005) — but given how the geographic regions impact all of ICANN's outreach activities I think we should make it clear to the Working Group how harmful or limiting these arbitrary groupings of countries can be.

Best wishes,

Ayden




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