[soac-newgtldapsup-wg] A comment on the use of category 432 (Landlocked Developing Countries) as a criteria

[Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Colleagues,

In this note I simply wish to point out a possible concern with one of 
the proposed criteria, specifically the reference to category 432, one 
of the area or region codes created by the UN Statistics Division 
(UNSD) and utilized by the UN Department of Economic and Social 
Affairs (UN DESA) within the Development Policy and Analysis Division 
(UN DPAD).
While reviewing the entries in category 432, "Landlocked Developing 
Countries", the size and necessity issues that occurred to me when 
reviewing category 722, "Small Island Developing States".
These are (some shortening of names): Afghanistan, Armenia, 
Azerbaijan, Bhutan, Bolivia, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Central 
African Republic, Chad, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, 
Lesotho, Malawi, Mali, Mongolia, Nepal, Niger, Paraguay,Moldova, 
Rwanda, Swaziland, Tajikistan, Macedonia*, Turkmenistan, Uganda, 
Uzbekistan, Zambia, Zimbabwe
As a motivational example, the .mn registry is operated by Afilias, 
and the name space is partially repurposed as a name space for the 
state of Minnesota, which has the alpha2 abbreviation in the US postal 
system as "MN". Additionally, while Mongolian script is rendered 
vertically in Inner Mongolia (autonomous region of the People's 
Republic of China, not an element of category 432), and Mongolian 
Cyrillic script is the official script of the Mongolian, no request 
has been made by the Government of Mongolia for a non-Latin script 
entry under the ccTLD IDN FastTrack process.
So what I suggest is that while category 432 is more useful than 
category 772 as a criteria for need, that where the associated ccTLD 
has been repurposed, or the application is not for the script actually 
in use by the majority population, or the application is not for a 
minority population, that the application serves little or no local 
public interest, and therefore, does not serve the public interest, 
and should not be qualified for support.
Eric

* The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia