Comments on the discussion of fairness, Bertrand and Anthony

[Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

In http://forum.icann.org/lists/eoi-new-gtlds/msg00076.html, a
representation is made by Anthony van Couvering which is curious.

Most of the examples offered by the author of that comment are, as he 
is aware, assisted by CORE, which has participated in every prior gTLD 
application round.
To suggest that applicants which have selected competitors are under
informed may seem natural, or creative, but it detracts from the real
issue, which is that there are applicants missing and there are
structural reasons why applicants are missing.

I am gratified to see similar comments from Jon, Steve, Michael, 
Amadeu, Werner, Bertrand, and Tim. We _are_ ICANN insiders, and we are 
concerned that some EOI advocates place self-interest ahead of 
institutional interest.
The fee may grow on trees in OEDC economies, but even bonding, 
accounting, letters of credit, and other instrumentalities present 
higher costs to applicants in Europe, and vastly higher real costs to 
applicants in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and the Americas south of 
the Rio Grande. There is a lot of "no dogs or Indians" still present 
in the DAG, and naturally enough, its authors don't see this as they 
do their best to be fair within their cultural and economic norms.
The fairness problem we confront is not merely fairness among the seat
holders that file to the microphones three times a year to comment, to
find equity between legacy and the post-2000 registries, though the
competition problem does compel us to address that, nor to find equity
between between the six and seven figure and eight figure 
capitalizations which have  acquired a delegation and similar 
capitalizations which have not.
We have to look past the usual suspects in the halls, impatient with 
the ICANN Board, to those conspicuous by their absence.
We met in Delhi. There is no application for Delhi, nor for other
Indian cities, nor South Asian cities. We met in Cairo, the same is
true, not just for Egyptian cities, but for Arab League cities. We met
in Mexico, the same is true for South American cities. The exceptions
to these are singletons.

Moreover, since Dr. Postel was compelled to choose iso3166 over 
regional alternatives, nations, but not peoples and their languages, 
have been afforded access to the IANA root. In 15 years, our record is 
Palestine by statistical trick, the European Union by currency trick, 
and Catalan, as an open linguistic and cultural development project. 
And that exhausts our record of delivering what we have, to the have nots.
I reviewed CORE's technical plant this week. On top of our existing 
load we could be running several copies of both .org and .net without 
breaking a sweat. That unused capacity is not going to support the 
cultural, linguistic, commercial and literary expressions of dozens of 
sub-national identities. I presume my peers at Verisign, NeuStar, and 
Afilias are similarly sitting on at least as much unused capacity as 
they have in actual use.
We have a very serious problem. We've stopped serving people who can 
use the DNS, who need to use the DNS, and have ratholed into a series 
of monitization schemes based upon scarcity. We could be starting a 
Yiddish linguistic and cultural preservation registry in what is left 
of the year, a Cree Syllabics linguistic and cultural development 
registry next year, and every year deliver on the promise of the net, 
on the utility of the DNS, to the other side of the digital divide.
Without "fairness" the public-private partnership model fails, and I'm 
very gratified to see Microsoft's comments along the lines of those 
I've cited above.
In a personal capacity, though obviously I work for CORE, as its CTO, 
which has an interest in the issue.
Eric Brunner-Williams