[council] FW: Proposal to form a Joint ALAC - GNSO WG "to develop a sustainable approach to providing support to applicants requiring assistance in applying for and operating new gTLDs" in response to the ICANN Board Resolution 20 at the Nairobi Meeti

[Bruce Tonkin]

Hello Caroline,


>>  I missed the Board meeting unfortunately and only have the
resolution to go on for now. Can anyone enlighten me as to what sort of
assistance / support was envisaged - was there more discussion on this
at the meeting or was it left open and therefore up to the proposed WG?

It was left open.  

During the EOI panel and various other forums during the week in ICANN -
there were members of the developing world noting that the costs to
participate in new gTLDs was high.  This is certainly been a consistent
message since the beginning of the new gTLD process, and the original
intent of the new gTLD committee in the GNSO was to deal with this in a
second round of new gTLDs to avoid gaming in the first round.

The Board has simply made an open call for suggestions.   At this stage
they would need to be made on a cost recovery basis - ie ICANN is not
changing the rules or costs for new gTLDs at this stage  ("ICANN has a
requirement to recover the costs of new gTLD applications and on-going
services to new gTLDs").  The Board also noted that the application
costs are a small proportion of the costs of operating a gTLD at high
levels of reliability.   The Board would be supportive if a group
decided to form a foundation that organizations could donate to, or
would be supportive if some in the industry offered some in-kind
contributions (e.g some staff support or computing resources) to helping
applications from the developing world.

Regards,
Bruce Tonkin