Capacity Building and Overcoming Barriers in Developing Countries

[Guru Acharya <gurcharya@xxxxxxxxx>]

I strongly support and advocate spending the proceeds towards capacity
building in developing countries and overcoming barriers to participation
in multistakeholder policy development processes.

This has become even more important in the face of ICANN's post-transition
role as the steward of IANA and the increased role of the community in
ICANN accountability.

The negligible active participation by developing country participants in
the CWG-Stewardship and CCWG-Accountability is a real world reflection of
the present barriers to participation in equal footing multistakeholder
models.

The present fund should be allocated completely towards:

1) Supporting ICANN related research projects in policy research centers
from developing countries.

2) Marketing gTLD opportunities in the business community of developing
countries.

3) Increasing fellowships to students and budding researchers from
developing countries.

4) Organising conferences in developing countries.

5) Introducing translations of existing documents into presently-excluded
languages of developing countries (such as Urdu, Hindi, Tamil, Bengali etc)

6) Supporting academic institutions (business and law schools) in
introducing curriculum and case studies on TLD opportunities


Regards,
Guru Acharya