Danny, Re:
Every other constituent body within ICANN's GNSO works on a global basis. Not one is divided into regional subsets.
Actually, this is not the case. Take the ASO. There are 5 Regional organizations, the RIRs (AfriNIC, APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC, RIPE/NCC), one per each ICANN Region. They debate internally, then bring the positions in the umbrella organization. Example. There has been a long debate on IPv6 address allocation. Each regional structure has debated it internally, because different regions have different problems (it does not take much to see that address allocation in North America has different problems than address allocation in Africa!), and then a common position has been reached. (Incidentally, the RIRs sign individually, not collectively, and the address blocks are given by IANA to the individual RIRs, not to the ASO or NRO, so to have regional structures is not just a formal division to please ICANN but a real functional organizational model, that predates ICANN). To a certain extent this happens also with the ccNSO. While the ccNSO does not have formal regions, there are regional organizations of ccTLD managers. Guess how many they are? And what coverage they have? (Hint: their names are, in alphabetical order, AfTLD, APTLD, CENTR, LACTLD, NATLD) The only supporting organization that is affected only because of geographical distribution, but not because of internal mechanisms, is the GNSO. But the fact that this one is the most visible should not let us draw the conclusion that the model is universal, quite the contrary. Cheers, Roberto