All I left a comment yesterday, to wit: "African countries participate in ICANN by sending reps to the GAC. AFAIK, NO countries fund ICANN, it's registries that fund ICANN for the most part. AfriNIC DOES make substantial contributions as part of the ASO. In other words, ICANN is funded (in part) by all ISPs and telcos in Africa that have IP address blocks from AfriNIC." see more inline below: On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 5:52 PM, <[email protected]> wrote:
ICANN: Africa must work hard too... 08 03 2010 Comments: 3 Available in: English
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Of course ICANN has no role in all these things and what it points is that more outreach is needed and maybe ICANN should have an office in Africa.
Perhaps, but consider what has been spent on new gTLd process already 10 M USD IIRC) and what an EOI will cost (55k USD) to make up for this. Then consider the extra overhead of a 4th office (and a 5th, as South America will feel unrepresented), then add those overhead costs on to the costs of a new gTLD domain, and instead of an estimated 185k USD to get a new gTLD, it will cost much more pricing developing country players out of this potential market. AfriNIC, as part of the NRO (and thus the ASO) is an ICANN process in Africa. -- Cheers, McTim "A name indicates what we seek. An address indicates where it is. A route indicates how we get there." Jon Postel