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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, especially Africa and 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 run by Registries based in developed countries, the ALAC finds it unfair to put the applications from developed and developing countries on the same level of priority. Giving the latter a priority will also promote diversity, enhance the accessibility of the developing economy citizens to the Internet and serves serve the public interest.

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

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To reduce the possibility of gaming of 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.

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