Puntogal (dotGal) comment

[Manuel Vilas <manuel.vilas@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Puntogal (dotGAL) is an non for profit and community based initiative
committed to promoting DotGAL, an Internet Domain for Galician culture and
language which will represent over 4 million Galicians living all over the
world. PuntoGAL has already gained the support of more than one hundred
associations and more than 12.000 internet users, as well as of linguistic,
local, regional and national authorities.

Puntogal sincerely thanks the JAS WG members for their extensive work and
long hours of deliberation. We would also like to thank the JAS group for
including ethnic, cultural and linguistic candidates in the JAS WG Second
Milestone Report as candidates that might receive support from the
community.

However, Puntogal is very concerned regarding the timetable. The program
should be implemented in the first round, starting January 13th 2012.
Consequently, candidates ideally need to know before 13th January if they
are going to receive support; which kind of support; and the percentage of
the total cst covered by the discount. Without this information, it will be
impossible to write up any kind of marketing or financial plan to meet the
April 13th deadline.

Therefore, Puntogal encourages JAS WG to ask ICANN for any help they may
need so that the Board can vote on the issue at the next public meeting in
Dakar. Any further delay might make the plan useless, as many potential
beneficiaries may not have time to prepare their proposals.

Puntogal also ask JAS WG to recommend to the Board that ICANN increase the 2
million dollar budget that has been announced. This amount might be
insufficient due to the huge expectation created by the ngTLDs process after
its long delay. Furthermore, no one knows when the second round will be.
Therefore, a large number of applicants that might receive support is to be
expected.

Puntogal agrees with the idea that no support should be granted to
applications "from a governmental or paraò‹statal applicant", if they come
from a developed country. However, a more precise definition of
"para-statal" will be helpful, because many public-funded institutions
(universities, public broadcasters, linguistic institutions, cultural
associations, etc) do collaborate at this moment with non-for-profit
candidates who promote domains for cultural and linguistic communities.

http://puntogal.org/?lg=ing