Re: [soac-newgtldapsup-wg] Fwd: [council] Announcement from JAS working group

[Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Chuck,

This is of course Council business, and my involvement is simply that 
of a JAS WG volunteer.
About a month ago I wrote Peter Dengate Thrush to ask if the 
conception he and Paul Twomey expressed at the Delhi meeting, which 
was the first time I encountered the "one string per application" 
construct, and which of course is ruinous for applicants using scripts 
the Unicode Consortium has constructed in such a way as to make 
variants frequent, which motivated Edmon and my attempt to discuss the 
problem with Peter and Paul, at the RyC-Board meeting.
I've not received a reply from the Chairman, and having given the 
issue some thought, it seems to me that where a user community exists 
which is linguistically plural, that we should be avoiding 
constructing the application process as causing incomplete ranking 
amongst the scripts and languages an applicant has the resources to 
offer to registrants.
We have the model that where we (the IANA function) can't agree over a 
delegation, e.g., ".eh" (Western Sahara), that we don't "pick one" and 
"ignore the other".
We have the model that where we (the new gTLD string contention 
process) can't agree between two or more Community applications with 
equivalent ranking, that we don't "pick one" and "ignore the other".
More broadly we have the model that we do no avoidable harm to 
communities with plural expectations of the consequences of an 
interaction with the ICANN Community.
Which leads me to suggest, as I did to Peter, and to the JAS WG, that 
we should view "an application" not as a string, but as the resources 
reasonably necessary to do the job.
In the case of a monolingual community, there is no change.

In the case of a linguistically plural community, the strings 
necessary so that no sub-community is disenfranchised through the lack 
of multiples of $185,000 (and all the trimmings).
In India there are 11 official scripts, and 22 official languages. An 
application for a reproductive health or rural economic development 
would, of necessity, have to deliver domain registration services in 
several languages, and several scripts, to avoid communitarian 
tensions. An application to assist the rural poor in a developing 
country could cost ten times what an application to offer a new 
feature to high-income urban elites in North America and Western Europe.
This is not unique to India, it is a feature in any current, or 
pre-existing "boarder" region, which globalization makes more common 
rather than less.
I trust this note does not distract from the formal WG to Chartering 
Bodies reportage, and that the GNSO retains a keen interest in 
managing the cost, and therefore the need for cost-recovery, for new 
gTLD applicants intending to extend the DNS and ICANN's service model 
to developing economies and minority language communities.
Thank you for your time and I look forward to seeing you in warm and 
sunny Cartagena.
Eric