[soac-newgtldapsup-wg] A comment on the use of category 199 (Least developed countries) as a criteria

[Eric Brunner-Williams <ebw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Colleagues,

I hope some of you have had a chance to look at my comments on 
categories 722 and 432, "Small Island Developing States" and 
"Landlocked Developing Countries", respectively, again, using 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).
In this note I addresses some concerns I have with category 199, 
"Least developed countries", which apply also to elements within 
categories 722 and 432.
By way of background, to motivate this, I want to point to two 
examples, both in the LDC category, and both in sub-Saharan Africa, 
north of the South African Customs Union (SACU).
At the Mexico City public meeting I met with the delegee for .bi. 
During the discussion of backend operator responsibilities I learned 
that the .bi registry had little or no physical existence in Burundi, 
in part due to connectivity issues (recall, the IPv6 requirement is 
problematic in large areas of Africa at present), and no immediate 
interest in registrants other than non-domestic trademark registrations.
During the Conficker .C response I directed a registry service 
provider's administrative unit to attempt to locate the operator of 
the .dc registry. During the course of the attempt I learned that the 
delegee for the Democratic Republic of Congo was not in the DRC, but 
in Switzerland, and the actual operator was in Singapore.
I suggest that if one accepts my recitation as being accurate, and 
relevant, that at least two conclusions follow.
First, that if either of these parties were involved in applications 
represented as being "from" the respective LDCs, that their 
applications would not be qualified for assistance, unless a 
substantially different fact pattern from the respective ccTLD 
registry operations were presented in the application(s).
Second, that for a variety of reasons, infrastructure availability at 
the current (and indefensible) level required by the corporation 
through the SLA requirements in the proposed registry agreement, 
vastly in excess of the requirements for the 2001 and 2004 round 
applicants being only one of those many reasons, that applications in 
any form arising organically from either "Country" or "Economy" are 
unlikely in the first place.
Next, I point out that the construct of Least Developed "Countries" is 
highly problematic. It has been only 60 years or less since the end of 
the Colonial Period in regions in which most of the elements in 
category 199 are situated. It is my impression, that as a category, 
elements of category 199 are significantly more likely to have 
experienced, or will experience, militarized domestic conflicts  than 
the "Developing Countries" category, or the "Developed Countries" 
category.
The likelihood that the corporation will receive proposals similar to 
the .aero, .coop, .museum applications of 2001, organically from an 
LDC seems quite low.
The likelihood that the corporation will receive proposals similar to 
the .cat application of 2004, organically from an LDC seems greater, 
but this takes the corporation close to deciding what is, and what 
isn't, a country -- an application of the IANA function which the IANA 
management has documented its resistance since the publication of RFC 
1591 in March, 1994.
My point in sum is that the LDC construct as an eligibility criteria 
may benefit very few applicants, and those applicants are likely to be
adversely affected by the micro-capabilities of the LDC economies.

So now I want to "step back" and explain my second reason for arguing 
with Jon Postel about using ISO 3166 in the first place, back in the 
winter of 1987/1988. Recall, the tool Jon was looking for was 
something that would allow delegation so the IANA work load would 
scale as the cost of network adapters slid down the price curve.
Indians and Gypsies are left out of ISO 3166. That was my first 
argument, and vastly more people live in mega-cities than in most 
micro-states, that should have been my third argument, had I thought 
of it at the time, and the only argument that actually addresses the 
scaling problem.
My second argument was that using ISO 3166 would create 50+ mostly 
doomed-to-failure registries, and that the better answer was to 
consider Africa as one or more regions, and use that region or regions 
rather than countries.
From that observation, first made in 1988, and obviously, from my 
opening examples of .bi and .dc, still valid two decades later, I 
suggest that one or more regional "umbrella" gTLDs is an alternate to 
a LDC specific association for applications.
Thank you all for your time, and Evan for asking my thoughts on the 
subject.
Eric