+++1. - Carlton ============================== Carlton A Samuels Mobile: 876-818-1799 *Strategy, Planning, Governance, Assessment & Turnaround* ============================= On Sun, Jun 17, 2012 at 9:35 AM, Evan Leibovitch <evanleibovitch@gmail.com>wrote:

The results indicate one or more of a couple of causes, depending on perspective:

- The ICANN publicity campaign for applicant support was so utterly pathetic, that only people already close to the process understood enough to take advantage of the opportunity;

- It's official; ICANN is a rich world organization serving rich world players, and only plays lip service to a global scope. The applicant support program made for good optics, but ICANN had no interest in its actually working. That a handful of insiders were able to exploit, enables those inside the bubble to still pretend that ICANN has worldwide sensibilities.

- Any claim that the bottom up process works, our that the public interest had a voice in ICANN, was definitively put to rest. This program was asserted on an unwilling Board, staff and industry by the public interest community, the first ever major policy initiative of this kind. So naturally, it never stood a chance.

- There truly is no demand for gTLDs outside the ICANN bubble of speculators and name-protectors, along with a handful of internet infrastructure providers. Only insiders are deluded enough to perceive that ANY money given to ICANN is money well spent on improving access or development. Community organizers - especially the ones targeted for applicant support - would rather spend their limited funds locally. IOW ... in the real world outside ICANN, gTLDs -- even subsidized -- are unnecessary vanity items that do not benefit providers or consumers of internet content and services.

The first explanation indicates incompetent execution of ICANN's mandate. The second indicates an intolerable bias in interpreting the mandate. The third suggests a horrible breakdown in the governance of the mandate. And the fourth suggests that the mandate itself is fundamentally flawed.

Take your pick. They're not mutually exclusive. On Jun 16, 2012 10:46 PM, "Alan Greenberg" <alan.greenberg@mcgill.ca> wrote:

...

The three support applications are particularly disappointing in light of all three being from long-time ICANN participants.

Alan

At 16/06/2012 01:15 PM, Avri Doria wrote:

...

Hi,

Indeed, the outreach plan was a failure in so many respects, and people have been complaining about it for a while to no avail, even while there was still a chance to fix it. And we see the results: 17 applications from Africa and 3 applicant support applications. And while I was hopping that 10 - 20 of the applications would be from ASP applicants, I meant of the global total, not of the African total.

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