On Jul 6, 2012, at 6:40 PM, McTim wrote:

>> This may not be the only reason -- the outreach program was certainly
>> pathetic, though it attracted not one but two applications for .africa --
> 
> one actually
> 
> and one for .DotAfrica.
> 
> a clever way to avoid name collision.

I heard a story in Prague that the latter was actually a screwed up effort to apply for the former.   Seemed rather funny at the time but may be apocryphal, would be curious to know…

It's easy to assert that the demand just wasn't there, but in the absence of any effective outreach that might have affected thinking it'd hard to know, so then it becomes a matter of adding layers of personal interpretation about they don't  need gTLDs, they have other things to do with their money, etc etc.  I can't see how that takes us very far.

Leaving aside the kind of applicants we as civil society types might have liked, there are a lot of big and even multinational companies now across the developing world for whom even the full $185k and operating costs could have been manageable and the business case for doing it would have been comparable to what the Northern firms saw.  Absent any real dialogue with such potential applicants or assessment of what ICANN did and didn't do, we won't really know what we're talking about.  So rather than projecting our respective viewpoints about the process generally onto this as purported explanations, why not get an assessment done so we have a little more datato go on.  We asked for one in our board meeting (but not in writing), and I believe GAC and ALAC did too.  Would be nice to hear something concrete from staff about next steps.

Bill