that the countries in ICANN's North American region include:
* American Samoa * Canada * Guam * Northern Mariana Islands * Puerto Rico * United States Minor Outlying Islands * United States * Virgin Islands, U.S.
Not really. The countries in the NA region are the US and Canada. All of those little islands are included due to a peculiar ICANN rule that says that political dependencies are placed with the mother country rather than where they really are. Since they are all legally territories or the equivalent, if ICANN were being consistent, they'd list Yukon, NWT, and Nunavut separately, too, but they don't. I gather this was at the insistence of France which did not want DOM and TOM such as St. Pierre grouped with their physical neighbors. There is some chance that ICANN will revisit this rule in the near future so I would not make any big plans based on it. As far as languages go, I agree that for now it makes sense to do work in English and French. If ICANN realigns the boundaries with reality and moves Mexico into North America, we would add Spanish. Once we realize that there are only two countries, the ICANN rule that requires that both reps cannot be from the same country means that there has to be one Canadian and one American, which should streamline the selection process. 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.