"Should the Middle East be grouped with Africa, or with
Asia/Australia/Pacific? For IP address allocation purposes, the Middle East countries
are currently served by the same regional Internet registry as North Africa (RIPE
NCC)."Sounds tricky, eh? Well, add Europe to the list as well. Where do Turkey
and my home country, Israel belong to? For most non-net-related intents and purposes
(Economy, Sports, Standard of living, etc.) they are part of Europe, not Africa,
Asia and most certainly not the Pacific region. As noted in the article, they are
served by RIPE NCC, which along with North Africa also serves Europe. Moreover, grouping
those countries with Africa will most certainly hurt the chances of a genuine African
being elected.
I suggest `conflicting` countries should be given the chance to
select the region they belong to, from *ALL* possible regions, by a preliminary vote
sometime around late August, if that is possible for ICANN to do. If not - well,
I'm out of ideas.