Assisting gTLD Applicants in Developing Countries Cartagena, Colombia 9 December 2010 >>EVAN LEIBOVITCH: Okay. Good morning to everybody. Thank you for coming here, and I know that the early sessions following the gala are always a challenge, so I appreciate your coming out here and joining us for the program on application support for the new gTLD program. And we have a couple of board members who may be presenting. They're not here right now. If they do come, we'll inject them into the proceedings, but for now, the format of this is going to be ourselves -- my name is Evan Leibovitch from at-large. This is Avri Doria from the GNSO and NCSG. We have been co-chairs of the JAS -- Joint Applicant Support -- working group between these two groups, and so Avri is going to give a presentation on the history and the nature of what we've been doing. Afterwards, I will moderate questions and answers from the floor. So Avri, the floor is yours. >>AVRI DORIA: Thank you. Okay. I am going to do a presentation of what we've done, as Evan said, and for those of you that came out at this time of morning for this, I am quite thankful. Hopefully more people will drift in during the day, because part of what we want to do is make sure that people know about the work. Okay. Pressing the green button makes it go? Pressing the green button doesn't make it go. Oops. Now I went too far. Okay. Thank you. The first thing is to talk about the time line of this. Oh, and let me start the clock. I was given 13 minutes to do this, so -- and of course I've already used up at least one of them. The group basically started -- or its first conception was with the GAC letter to ICANN back in March 10 of last year, sort of indicating that there was an issue in terms of both the fees and the processes of the new gTLD program for people from developing countries, and basically advising the board that something needed to be done about this. The board then put out a resolution stating that, "Yes, indeed, something should be done about this," and asking that something be done. So at that point ALAC and GNSO came up with a charter for a group, a mutually agreed upon charter, and the group started in April of, you know, this year. And in fact, all the work that we're talking about and the report basically was the product of about seven months of very intensive work. In June of this year, we came out with a call for input relating to support of new gTLD applicants and basically looking for what kinds of in-kind support there might be in the community for the work supporting new gTLD applicants from developing economies. We posted a snapshot. We spoke at the ICANN Brussels meeting. And we delivered an excerpt to the board at their request when they were going into their meeting to talk about, you know, what was the status of these efforts that they had requested. There was another board resolution in September, another board resolution in October, which basically had looked at the draft of our work and had said, "Keep on going and please make sure you do this in a cost-neutral way," and also thanking us for the work we had done. We have now published a milestone report that basically looks at and gives a high-level view of our recommendations. And basically we have asked that this be translated into the five other U.N. languages other than English. That has been done. They are available, and so hopefully people will be reading these and will be commenting. The comment period -- I don't remember the exact date at the moment, but it's about a month hence. One of the things that we remind people is of the new gTLD policy IGN, implementation guideline, and ICANN may put in place a fee reduction scheme for gTLD applicants from economies classified by the U.N. as least developed. And there is elsewhere mentioned -- well, I'll go into that later. So moving on. So the first thing we basically discussed is who should receive support. The most critical -- after all the discussions, there was one central requirement for receiving support, and that is basically having a demonstrated need. And by "demonstrated need," we pretty much mean people who could not participate in this process in any other way. So in other words, those for whom the pricing and the requirements were insurmountable barriers. We then looked at "beyond need," because "need" would be an incredibly wide category. It was sort of how do we constrain the set of applicants for the kinds of support we're talking about. So the first consideration is that they should be nonprofit organizations, nongovernmental, civil society, not-for-profit organizations. However, midway through, we got a -- there was a communique or a report or a paper, I guess -- I'm not sure what the right name is -- from AfrICANN and AFRALO saying that when you're talking about developing countries, the not-for-profit designation isn't always helpful, that very often you really need to be a small entrepreneurial enterprise. Many countries don't necessarily have the notion of a not-for-profit unless it's part of a government, and so they asked us to basically look into that, and so basically what we did is we said that local entrepreneurs in those markets where market constraints make normal business operations more difficult. So that that was basically put in in response to the comments from AFRALO and AfrICANN -- AfrICANN. Sorry. One of the important characteristics was that the applicants be located in emerging economies and we went slightly beyond just the emerging countries trying to find a proper definition. Applications in whose language -- in languages whose presence on the Web is limited. So it's not a "You must be an IDN," but certainly there's a preference given to languages not on especially those that are IDNs. And then community-based applications such as the cultural, linguistic and ethnic, in that the conception is that the community applications are very often those that contribute to the global public interest. They're there for that. So one of the things we did, though, is we defined these at a very high level. The board's request to us now was, "This is all well and good, but what does it really need? What does need criteria mean? How do you determine that? How do we determine that? Please go a little deeper. Please give us recommendations on what this all means." We also covered who should not receive support. At the moment, we've included the category of geographic names as a broad category in which we thought that at least in this first round a support need not be given, figuring that for the most part these geographic names would be supported by their geographical entity that they proposed to be a gTLD for. We also exclude purely governmental or parastatal applications, and that's in those cases where an organization was completely supported by a government, was part of a government, was part much an IGO's operations, that those were excluded, though -- and I'll come across it on a slide later, but I also mention it here, that that does not mean that having any support from a government would exclude you. For example, if the government gives support for the person writing the application, that would not necessarily, therefore, disqualify that applicant from receiving support, assuming all the other conditions were met. Business models that fail to demonstrate sustainability. So in other words, you know, one of the questions we come up with is "Well, if you give support to someone, doesn't that mean they're more likely to fail?" And no. One of the conditions is looking at the constraints of the economy and the situation that a gTLD applicant is in, do they have a business plan that makes sense. This might not be a business plan that would make sense in L.A., but do they have a sustainable business plan for their environment. We excluded the brand TLD category, should such a category be defined. There was, on the first three, we had full consensus of the working group. On this last one, we only had -- we had consensus, partial consensus, with a strong minority view that when talking, again, about developing economies, maybe it was appropriate to not completely exclude brands, but it is on the list of exclusion. The kinds of support to be offered. We suggest a number of cost reduction recommendations, and basically we looked at the cost as presented by the staff and in their memos and looked at some of those and looked at some that we felt did not make sense for an applicant from a developing region. For example, asking to waive the program development cost. It did not seem to make sense to us to look at charging a developing country who's in the process of developing for the many years that we've spent developing this program that they have a barrier against entry. Some of the other costs that were not directly related to actually processing the fees but were, you know, guarantee costs or reserve fund costs, also we felt that developing countries should be excused from those. We also talked about a proposal for staggered fees. As the fees are currently set, you have to pay everything up front and then should you fall out of the process, you get a certain percentage of refund. Our recommendation is that for those applicants who would meet all the conditions for the program, that they would, instead, pay a staggered fee where, let's say after the first stage you would get 70% back. For them to go through the first stage, they would have to pay 30. And then as each stage came up, they would have to come up with the money. This giving them more of a chance to raise the funds based upon their success, et cetera, their progress through the process. Other things we looked at were sponsorship and other funding. In other words, to sort of say, "Where can we go? Are there other organizations that could work with ICANN, could work with applicants in terms of trying to help fund their applications?" And so part of that was basically trying to sort of reach out to these other organizations, explain to them what it means to, you know, do a gTLD in a developing area, not something that probably is on their radar at the moment, and see what level of support we might be able to get from them, with the notion that that support would either come through ICANN or could come separately and directly. We looked at modifications on the financial continued operation instrument obligation. At the moment, I believe that that's three years and we were recommending that for these applicants, a six- to 12-month obligation of that would be more reasonable. Again, looking at the amount of money that someone would have to put up front and the difficulty of doing that within a developing economy. Logistical support of all sorts that includes translation of forms, helping to fill out the forms, and that sort of thing. Technical support for applicants in operating or qualifying to operate a gTLD. Now, one of the things I have to state up front is that in no way were we suggesting that the technical requirements be lowered. There may be arguments that people make elsewhere about whether the technical requirements are, you know, reasonable for all people. That is not something that we got into. What we said is, whatever the requirements that are set are set. These applicants need to meet them, but they need perhaps help. My favorite example on something like that is, for example, there's a requirement for IPv6 connectivity. IPv6 isn't everywhere. Certainly, you know, some island nations, some developing nations have not gotten to the IPv6 arena yet. They're barely in the IPv4 arena. So if they need to have a tunnel established -- a v4 tunnel established between them and a v6 distribution point, helping them get that set up so that that can actually happen and they can meet the v6 requirement. So that's my example. And then exception to the rules requiring separation of registry and registrar function. Now, people ask me, "Well, haven't you paid the attention to the fact that VI has already said that..." There's still a requirement inside the new gTLDs that you have to use a registrar or you have to become a registrar with the VI separation, but there's no guarantee that there's going to be a registrar in those scripts in those languages in those locations that is willing to serve this community. Obviously, you know, part of the technical support would be helping put them together with someone who was a registrar, but there's no guarantee that there is one, so in that case the possible exception from the requirement that there must be a separate registrar. Yes. Okay. Thank you. I -- I've just been informed I've hit my 13 so I better rush. Some of the guiding principles. There's a self-financing responsibility, in that the group decided that the support should not amount to more than 50%; that they do need to do some fundraising, they do need to be masters of their own application and they do need to come up with at least half of the thing; that there's a sunset period, that any of the aid that -- and support that we've talked about -- for example, lowering some of the yearly registry fees and such which we've discussed -- that those things would sunset. There has to be transparent in the application process. One has to know who is applying, what they're applying for, and such. Although, obviously, once one gets deeper into what is your financial need and how do you prove it, some of that may indeed be confidential. The limited government support that I mentioned earlier. And a notion that if you do one of these and you are successful, then you should repay into a fund to support developing economies in future rounds. So the next steps are, we've -- trying to get our charter renewed and basically there's the list of items that we suggested at the top level that now need to get further work. Establishing criteria, definition of mechanisms, establishing relationships, establishing frameworks for managing funds, methods for coordinating the assistance. So our next are, you know, to discuss and establish. Begin the work of finding donors. Reviewing the status of the 100,000 application base fee. We made no recommendations with regard to that because we really don't know how that fee is made up, and in a sense we have the same problem that many people along the years have had when approaching ICANN and saying, "Can you explain why this base fee is as it is and why it needs to be this high?" So further work includes trying to work with staff to truly understand that. One question of delay is, you know, the GNSO Council wants to make sure that our work does not delay the introduction of new gTLDs. On the other hand, the ALAC has, perhaps, a different view and thinks that, no, this is important and this is something that should be placed ahead of time. But our goal is to be in place by the time the applications start, given everything else that's going on. So we plan to work in parallel and not delay. Where to find more information. And I guess I'll leave it at that slide, because I'm sure the next one is a -- yes, a "thank you." Thank you. And then I will leave that one there for people to be able to go to the URLs. You can also find them on the Web page. I went four minutes over. My apologies. [ Applause ] >>EVAN LEIBOVITCH: Okay. Without further delay we'll go to Q&A from anybody who is in the audience who has a question or a comment. I ask everybody to give their names and affiliations as appropriate. And if you're in the working group and will be speaking, please identify yourself that way. We have a hard stop at 10:00, so -- but I'm hoping we can get in everybody's questions and concerns before then. Two microphones are open, and we have the online chat area ready to take anybody's comments. >>ERIC BRUNNER WILLIAMS: Thank you, Evan. Eric Brunner Williams, North American regional at-large organization, member of the JAS working group, or contributor to it. I hadn't planned on speaking at all, and -- but I have some news, which is that the coop, cat, travel, and tel registry operators met yesterday and discussed how they could jointly assist applicants. So this is a -- They have experience from going through startup in the 2005 and 2001 rounds. They have a kind of experience that is going to be of critical importance to our applicants who are needing not merely monetary support but operational intelligence, or the experience that these people bring with them. So that's the happy news I have, and I will now go sit down. Thank you. [ Applause ] >>EVAN LEIBOVITCH: Okay. There's nobody at the mics, the light isn't flashing. So does this mean that everybody is absolutely.... Oh, I see someone. >>AVRI DORIA: And please, as I say, working group members that want to amplify, people that want to, for example, indicate that they may be interested in support, please, anything that relates to this, feel free to come to the mic. >>EVAN LEIBOVITCH: Hello, Kathy. >>KATHRYN KLEIMAN: Kathy Kleiman, dot org PIR. And I am not part of the working group, and I am fairly outside what you are doing, and I am glad we can bring up things that are related, because this is related. And I was wondering to what extent the committee, those involved with you have been looking at the details of the new gTLD. There is something in there that I think would be of great interest to you. There is a registry restrictions dispute resolution procedure that has to do with challenging new TLDs, the community TLDs, which I would think many of your members will fall into. The standard is very, very low. And if you haven't looked at the rules of this dispute, we worked -- registries worked very hard on a parallel dispute procedure called the post-delegation dispute policy, the PDDRP. Because the standards were so low we said the standard for taking away a TLD after it exists, after it may have dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions of registrations it is too low, and the impact on registrants will be enormous. We really need to raise the bar on this and make it fairer for the registries, fairer for the complainants and fairer for the registrants. Let me bring to your attention two things you need to look at. This is a special sections part of Module 5, the gTLD registry agreement. Again, the standard is fairly low. The parties to the dispute will be the harmed organization or individual and the gTLD operator. ICANN will not be a party. And it's really about harm, but the harm is not defined. The challenge can be to the TLD itself, and taking away the TLD can be a remedy. There are other remedies as well. Please make sure to look at footnote number 1. It's all brand-new. It's an entirely new procedure where the registry, the community organization can be challenged for each and every registration. It's a complaint process one by one. It's unprecedented to challenge a registry for a registrant's action. And it's brand-new. It was just put in there. So I am afraid these organizations that coming in, working so hard up front to find the money, to get the counsel, to put in the application, to have the TLD, may then be bombarded by complaints that they will then have to hire counsel for to respond to, that may have significant -- significant implications for their ongoing operational costs. Thanks. >>AVRI DORIA: Can you stay for one second? >>KATHRYN KLEIMAN: Sure. >>AVRI DORIA: First of all, I would like to thank you for bringing that up. I'd like to ask whether, if you've got any time, you would be able to at least meet with the group on some of our phone calls to go into it more deeply and perhaps make recommendations about what should be done about that. And I would invite you to sort of make those recommendations now, other than just our looking at it. But, yes, we should. >>EVAN LEIBOVITCH: Sorry. My first reaction is that that has an applicability that sort of goes beyond what we are talking about in terms of the very specific category of applicants that need extra support. This is an issue of stability ongoing, and sustainability of the application once it's going. But what's the applicability to the specific subset of applications that we have been talking about that would need support? I mean, there's a lot of communication organizations, including rich- world ones, that might have the same issues. >>KATHRYN KLEIMAN: Yes, but if you guys don't deal with it, no one else has, and everyone else is silent. The groups that will be most impacted by these ongoing policies are the groups that you talking about and talking to. >>AVRI DORIA: One of the issues we had and one of the constraints we have worked under is it wasn't for to us challenge things. So we can look for a remedy for those. And, for example, the first thing that would come to mind would be going to a bunch of lawyers who could support them in this dispute resolution mechanism, as opposed to changing it. One of the sort of benchmarks of the work we have been doing is that we haven't taken on those global issues to change the procedures globally, but, rather, we have looked at the procedures that have been set and agreed to by everyone else and sort of figured out, okay, how do we ameliorate that for the developing economies. So we would look at, for example, dealing with that by perhaps, you know, lining up a set of lawyers who were willing to help them in a pro bono manner to deal with this. >>KATHRYN KLEIMAN: Two responses. One, the procedures have not been set and agreed to by everyone. Everyone is fighting over the gTLD language. And two, it's just a friendly heads-up, and if you guys don't deal with it, no one will. >>EVAN LEIBOVITCH: Understood and appreciated while also acknowledging it's a bit out of the scope of the very specific bounds that we were given as a working group. But taken, appreciated. I'll be taking that back to ALAC. But it's a little bit beyond our specific scope here. Andrew, are you next? >>ANDREW MACK: Sure. I was just going to pick up on what Kathy just said. I'm Andrew Mack. I'm a member of the working group. And I actually think it's a good point she brings up. I agree with you completely, Evan, it may be a little bit on the edge of where we are, although having lawyers on hand certainly fits into our logistical basket. No question about that. I would say that as equally important as translation help and things of that nature. The other thing is I think we are wise if we are trying really hard to support this community. I'd rather see us -- I know we have already had some impact on the guidebook, some positive impact. And I would rather see us lean forward maybe just a tiny bit to say, hey, if we go in this direction, the sense of our group is that this will really disproportionately harm these applicants. And since we have already determined, by dint of the fact -- by the board resolution and by dint of the work that we have done that we want this to receive support. Let's try not to provide a rear guard to something where -- we just raise the flags and say, hey, guys, we are the ones who are most likely to be negatively affected. I think Kathy is on to something. >>EVAN LEIBOVITCH: Well taken. Anyone else? Eric, do you have another comment? >>ERIC BRUNNER WILLIAMS: Yes, if I may. Would you mind if I turn the microphone around so I can face the audience rather than you? >>EVAN LEIBOVITCH: I know what you look like. >>ERIC BRUNNER WILLIAMS: Right; exactly. [ Laughter ] >>AVRI DORIA: But I would suggest putting it back the other way afterwards. In fact, we could have two microphones, one facing us and one facing the audience and people pick their preference. >>ERIC BRUNNER WILLIAMS: Okay. Eric Brunner Williams again from North American regional at-large organization. Kathy, we had a similar question arise in the issue of language support. And the test that we came up with, and we haven't agreed on as a working group but it's still a plurality of views within members of the working group that if the plurality of language is something which associates to the material condition of the applicant -- so translated into English, are poorer applicants from the third world more likely to service more than one language in order to get by? That is, do they have a requirement for some local language and perhaps the colonial language, like English, or do they have multiple language communities within a market? Which is not the general case within the northern hemisphere rich world, which is generally monolingual as well as being materially well off. That distinction makes it so -- that review allows us to consider the linguistic requirements of poorer applicants as being somehow material to our test looking for application support issues. So while it appears to be a general issue, we can see a correlation that plurality of language correlates also to, well, non-monolingual market areas, which are generally rich market areas. The universality of the condition of the contract containing new language which strikes all applicants equitably or equally or equally badly, doesn't allow us to see how the poorer applicants are somehow harmed more or have greater dependency. And yes I take the point that they will have to retain counsel and that's got to cost. Of course the obvious response is to go and look for counsel for free. But that solves that kind of problem or appears to solve that kind of problem. Whereas when we look at how we can do that for something such as languages, we can't find a solution so we have to look for whether or not something like bundling is a reasonable approach to where we have plurality of language, as something that arises, for instance, from the Indian subcontinent, from East Asia, from Africa, but not from Latin America. Thank you for your time. >>KATHRYN KLEIMAN: Just on one of the very many excellent points Eric makes. Pro bono counsel. It's one thing to look for it on occasion. It's another thing if the threshold is very low on something to need to look for it every week, every month, every year. >>AVRI DORIA: Understood. Thank you. And thank you, Eric, for your points. >>EVAN LEIBOVITCH: Is there anyone else from the floor who has a question or issue? Or is there anyone who is on the working group who wants to expand or amplify an existing issue? Tijani, go ahead. >>TIJANI BEN JEMAA: Tijani Ben Jemaa. I am from the working group, so I am not asking a question, but I would like you to explain what is the rationale behind our ancestors that the support to the needy applicants must be applied at the upcoming first round. Why we will not wait for the next round? >>EVAN LEIBOVITCH: Actually, Tijani, we're just chairs. Would you like to help make that comment yourself? >>AVRI DORIA: I mean, it's a good question, and Evan's answer was perhaps asking you or one of the other members. I can certainly start off the discussion of why. In fact, we wrote a FAQ answer on this, frequently asked questions on this. And basically the question was, as I understood it, is why do you need to get developing economy applicants in this first round? Why isn't it sufficient to wait for future rounds? And within the answers that we developed within the group is, first of all, look at how long it's taken do get to this first round. Any predictions or assumptions that someone tries to make about their being a second round and when that would happen is -- we can't even predict when the first round is going to start, let alone a second round. Although we're getting closer to predicting what year the first round may occur. Other reasons had to do with the ability to get what, you know, one could consider reasonable TLDs for a population for a community around the world. In the first round, the -- you know, we have got the new ccTLDs in the various language and script. We will have a first round that will basically take a lot of the air out, we think, of getting people onto new gTLDs. And so we think that for many of these communities, for many of these locations, the ability to get involved and to get a gTLD would be limited. I think the third reason is that we truly believe that the global public interest is served by this, and that it helps in the development of the Internet in these regions to have these communities able to get involved now, and as opposed to telling them, "Listen, guys, wait another several years -- two, three, five, et cetera -- before you start to be able to get involved in this global network at this level," and hope that this kind of program allows for the introduction of new registries in the developing economies, introduction of new registrars in the developing economies. So that was part of the reasons, part of the discussion that came up while we were saying, "Why did we need do this now?" Because it was a reasonable question. But we think it's reasonable to say, no. We need for these developing economies to be supported now in order for ICANN to serve its purpose as serving the global public interest. And I ask anyone to please add to anything I left out of that. >>EVAN LEIBOVITCH: Okay. Is there any other questions or any other clarifications? So everybody knows everything they need to know about this. Ahh. Go ahead, Elaine. >>ELAINE PRUIS: Hi, I am Elaine Pruis, part of the working group. This morning we gave a presentation to the ICANN fellows, and there were some questions in that group about why we are suggesting that geographical names not be qualified for support. Could you elaborate on that, please. >>AVRI DORIA: First, is there anyone else from the group that would like to give that answer as opposed to me talking all the time? >>EVAN LEIBOVITCH: Right. We're just chairs. There's other people from the working group that were well involved in this. If somebody else would like to participate, we're just the ring leaders at the top here. Ahh, Carlos. Go ahead. >>CARLOS DIONISIO AGUIRRE: Hi. Carlos Aguirre, member of the working group. A comment, a question, I don't know. >>EVAN LEIBOVITCH: Do you have an answer specific to Elaine's point about the geographical names? >>CARLOS DIONISIO AGUIRRE: No. I think we need to fix more deeply some -- some concepts about who are needy applicants, because many people are not completely know about what is one needy applicant. On the other side, I want to ask the audience if there are any other questions after Avri's presentation. Because we need to continue work or continue to work, and we need your contributions. So, please, ask if you have some other questions to clarify or something like that. Thank you. >>AVRI DORIA: Thank you. Eric, were you going to answer the geographical question or perhaps should I answer that before you add? >>ERIC BRUNNER WILLIAMS: I want to stick in one process issue relating to that question before we give the answer that we arrived at. That is, what we didn't know when we arrived at the answer. >>AVRI DORIA: Okay. >>ERIC BRUNNER WILLIAMS: Thank you. So the policy that we adopted on geographic names, we adopted before DAG v5 was actually published. So we were actually unaware that all names would be examined to be that -- whether they were geographical names, and some assumptions about what geographical names were that we didn't actually consciously collectively share within the working group. So for instance, we may have considered city names to have been geographical names. We may have considered provinces and territories, in the ISO 3166-1 and 2 sense, to be geographical names but I don't know that we were clear that U.N. regions were geographic names. Because it's clear that in the first two cases, there's some public entity that may be involved in funding the application, or may be involved in supporting it. It's not clear when we ask for entire Latin America or entire Africa or Antarctica that we can find a body that is going to provide any funding assistance at all to this regional applicant. So with that caveat that we didn't know what geographical names would mean in the future, we answered a question about geographical names. Thank you for your time. >>AVRI DORIA: Thank you. Basically, the assumption we were making -- and you're right, we did not distinguish whether this applied to regional or city or country or state or province -- was that, in general, those applications would have -- first of all, they needed to have a certain amount of support from the city, state, region, country they were in, and that the primary assumption on need that we were making at what they couldn't even get involved in the process without a certain amount of aid and support and at both tangible and in-kind, would not be met. And that, therefore, also, one of the things that we had been asked to do in the charter was to try and create a constrained set that would make it manageable -- and basically by excluding geographic names in this round, made it quite -- it helped to constrain the set of possible applicants that would meet the support requirements. Let me quickly answer the other question -- I lost the other question. He was asking for more help but Carlos asked a question before that and when I was talking on geography I lost whatever it is. So I will come back to that but some to the next person in mind. >>STEVE DELBIANCO: Steve DelBianco with net choice. And Avri, when you were speaking just before we switched to geographical names, we were talking about this imperative about really helping the global public interest and focusing it so tightly on the user communities, the users and registrants and communities that are -- and what I thought were underserved by the current Domain Name System. And those would be communities that don't have a lot of TLDs either on the C or G side in their own scripts, in their own languages. IDNs especially. And with that sort of a setup it, occurred to me that focusing on needy applicants is only half the game. The other half the game is focusing on applicants we need. Not just an applicant who needs some help but we may need applicants to create TLDs, to serve the underserved communities. So to say it's applicant support for the benefit of the applicant misses the point that you made. It is applicant support for the benefit of the users and registrants in the targeted community. When you look at it that way, what you said about helping the needy parts of the world is about helping users and registrants, that's the objective. The means to serve that end is to help an applicant. So I'm suggesting that we're really not helping applicants. We are helping users and registrants, and applicants are the way to it. >>AVRI DORIA: I can accept the reasoning of that. And part of this is participating in the outreach and such. But I think going that extra step, while it's really an interesting idea of creating applicants -- because you're saying we may need something so to do that we would have a notion of creating applicants, I think that that goes beyond a constrained set of -- and it also requires -- >>STEVE DelBIANCO: I didn't say "creating." I said "helping." >>AVRI DORIA: But they don't exist yet. We are talking about people that do outreach. We come up with a set of applicants, I mean, find -- a set of applicants come to us or we outreach for said applicant. But to basically go beyond that -- >>STEVE DelBIANCO: If we find applicants who are already targeting certain domains, how do we encourage that, to deploy those domains to the underserved linguistic communities? >>EVAN LEIBOVITCH: I don't mean to get too deeply into the middle of this, I don't think it was a goal as a group to interfere to much with the market processes, that if there was an applicant that had the funding to do so that identified a market that needed to be served, typically then you have a business case for being able to serve them. The purpose of this group, I think, was to try and help applicants in regions for which both the applicants had a need and the -- and their target audience had a need. I mean, the main criteria here was need on behalf of the applicant, the gTLD applicant. And that was a core -- that was the one circle in the middle of all the rest of them. >>STEVE DelBIANCO: Thanks, Evan. But I believe that the need -- serving the needy applicant was a means to the end of serving needy registrants and users. And if we have a board member in the room who is not otherwise occupied, I'd like for get some clarification. Should I try that again? All right. Don't know the answer. Maybe I will take it up in the public forum today and ask the board what they meant in that September resolution. Was it just about needy applicants, or was it the needs of registrants and users and, therefore, help applicants to serve them? Maybe you guys can't even answer it, but I appreciate the effort. >>EVAN LEIBOVITCH: Okay, thanks. Okay, Peter. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: Peter Dengate Thrush. Just having a stab at it, I think we saw the TLD applicant as the front of a community. And so it's the particular ecosystem of a group that they represent. It is both the individual registry operator obviously and the community that they serve, the registrants and the users. >>EVAN LEIBOVITCH: Would you personally agree that the need of the applicant is probably a very, very major criteria in the kind of support that we're talking about within the confines of this group? >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: (Speaker off microphone). >>STEVE DelBIANCO: Thanks. >>ANDREW MACK: I am going to try and see if I can't come and bring both sides together because this is actually something we have talked about a fair amount in our working group. We talked a lot about the idea of the need of the applicant and the need of the community in which they find themselves. And I think that there is a distinction in that and the distinction is meaningful. But I think that both are valid based on all of our conversations and the fact that people really do exist in communities, that they don't really exist as individual applicants per se because of the nature of what we're trying to do, right? And so I think -- I think a focus on both is probably valid and appropriate. The second piece is, Evan, to go to your earlier discussion of creating a market, it is something -- I want to refer back to something that Carlos said at the very beginning of some of our conversations, which was this isn't a level playing field and it really isn't. If you think about it, if you are talking about -- you guys know what I'm talking about, so I will move around. It isn't -- Excuse me. It isn't a level playing field in the sense that if you are coming to this process, not speaking English, perhaps not speaking -- coming from a country where you don't have easy access to the kind of lawyers and consultants you'd need to participate in this process, so you have extra steps that need to be done or extra costs that might be in it, then, you know, you really are, to some extent, in a disadvantaged situation. And what Carlos -- one of the things that Carlos mentioned early on in our conversation, I think, is very valid, is that we hope that ICANN and the rest of the community will do outreach so that people around the world in all of these different markets that are -- there aren't as close to ICANN world will understand what's out there for them as a possibility. It is an affirmative action, I think, if we just sit back and say Well the market mechanism will take care of itself. Maybe that's a little overly optimistic. Thank you. >>AVRI DORIA: Thank you. Just a note, we have five minutes left. So if anybody does have a comment that they're going to want to make, please get to the microphone. >>ERIC BRUNNER-WILLIAMS: Okay. Thank you very much, co-chair. I want to ask a clarifying question of Steve and also of Chairman Dengate Thrush. In 2004, we had Association puntCAT that was the applicant for the dot cat registry. But before it existed, there was the Catalonian cultural institutions, ISOC Catalonia and two more agencies which are -- I just have acronyms for and won't bore you with my attempt to speak Catalan. Steve, is it your point that we should be looking for this preapplicant in 2003-2004 that will become puntCAT? Peter, is that your understanding of the question that Steve is asking, that we should be trying to find that applicant that will serve the Catalan people in 2005, 2006? Are should we be waiting for puntCAT to be formed by these four institutions and then consider the question of whether or not they need assistance in order to serve the Catalan people? Which one of these two cases were you speaking to, Steve? And which one of these two cases were you speaking to, Peter? Thank you. >>STEVE DelBIANCO: Thank you, Eric. I was speaking not about ginning up new applicants but making sure that our guidebook encourages the applicants that show up to not only deploy in the scripts and languages they're targeting but scripts and languages that are used by communities that would also benefit from that, that need that particular TLD. So Catalan uses Latin script, so there was already ability to put Catalan URLs, Catalan domain names into the DNS beforehand. So that probably doesn't fit as well. It is really about a TLD, dot sport, dot food, that would be deployed in one or two scripts but certainly not in 10 or 20 scripts. And those communities only can use TLDs in their own ccTLD if they are an IDN, they are only that. And I just worry that applicants aren't going to build out multiple scripts, particularly the IDNs, unless we find a way at ICANN to encourage that. >>EVAN LEIBOVITCH: Peter, would you like the last word? We are getting to the top of the hour, so you will have the last word from the floor. >>PETER DENGATE THRUSH: I'm just going to try and answer Eric's question. I don't quite understand it. Is it that there was a condition under which there was some individual components of a community on their own weren't able to afford it but together they could? >>ERIC BRUNNER-WILLIAMS: (Speaker off microphone). >>EVAN LEIBOVITCH: Eric, you weren't at the mic for that. >>EVAN LEIBOVITCH: Carlos, we are at the top of the hour. If it's not very brief and to the point -- Okay, Eric. Go ahead. >>ERIC BRUNNER-WILLIAMS: Thank you. What I said off mic to Chairman Dengate Thrush was that I misunderstood Steve's original question, which was not so much about finding an applicant for a community so much as finding -- or assisting -- existing applicants do offer TLDs in scripts that they might not otherwise do, so which were generic in nature such as sport or food rather than community in nature such as Catalan. Thank you. >>EVAN LEIBOVITCH: Okay. Carlos, you do have the last word. >>CARLOS DIONISIO AGUIRRE: Just a short comment, back to Steve's words, we are a group -- working group with two parts. One part is ALAC. And ALAC tried to defend the end users' interests. We worked seven months very hard with two teleconferences a week thinking in end users' interests. The idea of this working group is to think in this part of the community. Thank you. >>EVAN LEIBOVITCH: Okay. Thank you. Sébastien just came in. He's about to come on the board and also a member of the working group. We are at the top of the hour, so please. >>SÉBASTIEN BACHOLLET: Just to apologize, I was in another meeting and this week is completely crazy for me and I apologize for that. I want really to support the work done in this working group, and I am sure that you will still stay engaged for the next phase. We need your engagement. We need your participation, and we need you to go up to the end of this work. And I hope that other people from the community will join this working group and will help this working group to fulfill its mission as soon as possible. It is very important. And thank you very much for the hard work you are doing. I will try to follow the working group as much as I can, but I will not be engaged in it as I will take my seat on the board next Friday. Thank you very much. >>EVAN LEIBOVITCH: Fully understood. [ Applause ] And thank you, Sébastien. Okay. On that note -- >>ANDREW MACK: Just on a quick note, on behalf of the working group, we would like to thank Avri and Evan for all the work that they have done as our chairs. It is a tremendous amount of work. [ Applause ] >>EVAN LEIBOVITCH: Thanks. And I was just about to cut you off. And on that note, I just want to thank you. Please, you got those URLs you have got on the screen, if you have access to the slide set. Please get involved. This is, we believe, a very important issue. It is something board mandated. It is something that the communities believe is important, and we really want to move this forward. So please find us on the Web. Find our progress, get involved in our calls, join our group. We appreciate you being here. And thanks very much. Have a good rest of the conference. >>AVRI DORIA: Thank you. [ Applause ]