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ALAC STATEMENT ON THE ICANN proposal to PROPOSAL TO USE A DRAW FOR PRIORITIZING NEW gTLD APPLICATIONS

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The ALAC expresses its great satisfaction for the prioritization of the IDN applications because it promotes linguistic diversity on the Internet, which will enhance Internet accessibility to those whose language doesn’t does not use the Latin characters and make them use the Internet in more applicable to their daily life; this serves the public interest. 

The new gTLD program showed that very few applications originated from developing economies, especiallyAfricaand Latin America & Caribbean regions. It is our view that this is the result of poor outreach effort of outreach from ICANN regarding the new gTLD program as well as the availability of applicant support availability in the regions where those people live. 

Therefore, and also because all the existing gTLDs are from developed countries, the ALAC finds it unfair to put the applications from developed and developing countries on the same level of priority. Giving the later a priority will also promote the diversity, enhance the accessibility of the developing economy citizens to Internet and serves serve the public interest. 

The ALAC believes that prioritizing applications from developing economies will not have a big impact because the total number of the concerned applications (Africaand LAC regions) is only 41 only, which represent less than 2.13% of the total number of applications. 

Nevertheless, the At-Large Advisory Committee understands the worries of those who are concerned about giving priority to applications from developing countries that are applied for by rich people from the north, even if the same case applies for the IDN applications too. 

A To reduce the possibility of gaming this process, a case by case treatment should be undertaken for applications from developing economies to find out those genuinely applied for by developing country citizens and organizations. 

The ALAC thinks believes that rebalancing re-balancing the Internet domain industry (lingual and geographic) and the consideration of the public interest should be the main criteria for any prioritization. IDN and developing economies economy applications deserve to be on the top of the list..