The following presentation from the Sao Paulo meeting may be useful, especially for those who are new to ICANN. It discusses why the current review of Geographic Regions in ICANN is important and what the regions are used for.
There's a couple of separate issues going on here. One is that dependent islands are grouped with the mother country, I gather at the insistence of France. This is pretty clearly wrong, but the slides made this look like a bigger deal than it is, since at least half of the ccTLDs placed into wrong regions are uninhabited. The largest (debatably) misplaced island is Puerto Rico with 4 million people, and many of the rest are flyspecks like St Pierre with about 6,000. My impression is that if the French relent, everyone else is OK with each island deciding where it belongs. The more serious issue is that the regions are of wildly varying sizes, both in terms of population and of Internet activity. Africa is too small, Asia/Pacific is much too large. My impression is that the boundaries were set based on the amount of Internet activity a decade ago, and China in particular has grown like crazy. Again, I don't see any organized opposition to changing the boundaries, although if the number of regions changes, the composition of the board and the ALAC changes, and there's transition issues if countries are moved from one country to another. For us in North America, there is a reasonable argument to be made that Mexico and perhaps the Caribbean is grouped more logically with North America than with South. The main practical difference this would make is that we'd have three major languages rather than two. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://johnlevine.com, Mayor "I dropped the toothpaste", said Tom, crestfallenly.