Re: [soac-newgtldapsup-wg] Prioritization

[Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

All,

My preference is not to assume that the available support will be 
insufficient to meet the needs of the qualified applicants.
I prefer that a Yiddish or a Basque or an Indigenous to the Americas 
or similar application be prioritized ahead of a .web or a .shop or a 
.shoe, but ICANN has steadily refused to differentiate and prioritize 
applications since the Board approved the current effort at the Paris 
meeting.
As ICANN won't prioritize IDN over ASCII, or Community-based over 
Standard, though it will allow a community's investment to survive in 
the presence of one or more applications that seek to exploit the 
community's existence, I don't see how we can withhold support to 
applicants that meet the criteria.
If the "2011 round" were for Community-based applicants only, then it 
would be trivial to restrict support to only Community-based 
applications meeting the needs criteria. The same if the round were 
only for NGO / non-profit applicants, or for IDNs, or for standard types.
Support is not limited to the application fee, or to specific elements 
in the application as a text submitted with the application fee. 
Support is as concrete as a specific dollar denominated credit, or as 
symbolic as an exemption from a checklist item, and as universal as a 
logo or status claim on a marketing communication.
Suppose there isn't a pot of cash to dole out, but a donor list. To 
prioritize would mean ordering or ranking which applications "go 
first" and which "go last" in exercising the donor contact list. As 
Tijani pointed out, this is the realm of subjectivity.
For these reasons, though my involvement dates to attempts as early as 
the adoption of iso3166 to get a delegation to a pan-tribal operator 
to implement an on-line "Indian Country", and I donated my time to the 
PuntCat effort, and donate my time as a contributor to the 2001-2003 
and 2008-2010 IDN efforts of the IETF and as an off-and-on again 
member of the Unicode Consortium since 1988, I prefer not to 
prioritize among the qualified applicants.
If there are qualified applicants which are "Entrepreneurs in those 
too tight markets for a reasonable profit making industry", they 
should be able to obtain an equal share of the support available to 
all. ICANN has made every cultural, linguistic, non-governmental, 
municipal and sub-national governmental and non-profit applicant wait 
until it was ready to handle a large number of Entrepreneurial 
for-profit applications. Limiting applications to only those 
entrepreneurial applications which are highly capitalized and not from 
developing countries would fail the representative goal.
Eric