Contributions from Asociación Puntogal

[Manuel Vilas <manuel.vilas@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

PuntoGAL is an association committed to promoting dotGAL (puntoGAL), an
Internet Domain for Galician culture and language which will represent over
4 million Galicians living all over the world:

We thank ICANN once again for the work put into developing this Proposed
Final Applicant Guidebook (AGB). Although it is not the final version, its
publication means a step forward towards the implementation of new gTLDs, as
it solves many of the overarching issues of previous versions.

However, the 12.000 people and more than 100 associations that support
PuntoGAL are still waiting for a definitive schedule and for the specific
rules that will guarantee a fast and trustworthy evaluation. Therefore,
PuntoGAL would like the ICANN to bear in mind the following contributions:

According to the Proposed Final AGB, if there are more than 500 applications
ICANN will create batches. In order to choose who enters the first batch,
the AGB just says that "this process will be based on an online ticketing
system or other objective criteria". PuntoGAL arguments that a community
based candidate should gain priority over a commercial proposal. For
instance, dotGAL can contribute to improve Internet linguistic and cultural
diversity by increasing the online content in Galician and promoting
Galician cultural values on the net, as dotCat has already achieved with
47.000 new domains.

It is evident that proposals developed in order to achieve commercial
profits do not have as much public interest as the ones promoted by cultural
and linguistic communities. Moreover, many of those proposals are financed
by large corporations. Thus, for most of the commerically-oriented gTLDs,
the inclusion in the first batch would not be so critical . On the contrary,
puntoGAL and the rest of cultural and linguistic candidates will find it
very difficult to explain to their community supporters that their proposals
are still waiting to be evaluated, while ICANN examines commercial
initiatives which do not have a large support among the Internet user
community and that will not contribute to improving cultural diversity on
the internet.

-Timeline. The PuntoGAL Association congratulates the ICANN team because it
has been able to solve issues in which a consensual solution was impossible
to reach. Before achieving this, ICANN published five drafts of the AGB and
gave everybody the opportunity to criticize them, and ICANN has taken many
of the contributions into account. As its title makes clear, the Proposed
Final Applicant Guidebook (AGB) is a step forward, but it is not the
definitive solution. This provisional nature prevents dotGal from being able
to clearly inform the Galician speaking community, which is very interested
in this long process. Moreover, as there is not a definitive schedule,
dotGal and the rest of candidates cannot decide about indispensable points
to prepare their proposals. It is evident that ICANN knows this problem and
is is trying to speed up the solution. PuntoGal encourages ICANN to write
down the final rules of the AGB in order to be able to achieve the May 30
2011 opening date for applications, as ICANN has recently published. This
achievement will undoubtedly contribute to improve community confidence in
ICANN's work.