Good point. Jacqueline Siavash Shahshahani wrote:
Jacqueline, Let me follow up on your and John's statement "...encourage and enable individuals from the region to participate at the meeting...". As you know, I'm from West Asia, but twice in the last few years I've been denied visas to go to Egypt for meetings to which I had been invited by very legitimate bodies including the Library of Alexandria where I was to give a talk at the opening. Reason: I carry an Iranian passport. Very recently, an IDN meeting was to take place in Cairo; I explained my predicament to Egyptian GAC representative who assured me she'll get things straightened out, but she has not been able to. Now a lot of things may not be within the purview of ICANN, but ICANN could at least be asked to seek assurance of cooperation from the host country in the issuance of visas for people from the region! Siavash
Ditto this Thanks John - you do write well! But I would add - encourage and enable individuals from the region to participate at the meeting AS WELL AS in all ICANN activities (that are interesting and relevant to them) Jacqueline John Levine wrote:
4a. The role of the At-Large Advisory Committee ("ALAC") shall be to consider and provide advice on the activities of ICANN, insofar as they relate to the interests of individual Internet users.
- Individual internet users in Egypt are active online (see refs below).
Individual Internet users do all sorts of stuff. By this logic, we should be lobbying in favor of clean drinking water and sanitary sewers, too. There are all sorts of things that are virtuous and important, but outside ICANN's scope.
ICANN's remit is really quite narrow: DNS, IP allocation, and minor IANA registry management. It makes sense to do what we can to encourage and enable individuals from north Africa and west Asia to participate at the meeting, but beyond that, we're off in the weeds.
R's, John
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