I continue to be amazed at the speed at which seemingly obvious explanations are so casually dismissed within the ICANN bubble. To deny such answers merely because of their perceived simplicity may offer comfort to those who need to add "layers of personal interpretation" in order to fit a pre-conceived conclusion, but the
onus is on them to disprove the simple explanation. Furthermore, there is an intellectual requirement to separate logical analysis from wishful thinking; the inclination to distort the distinction between the two even has
its own meme.
I have yet to see significant evidence in the developing world of "if we'd only known about the gTLD program we would have applied". As a counterpoint, anyone who was even casually
watching the IT media in
Africa could not avoid the protracted political sparring between DCA and Uniforum on who had more entitlement to ".africa" -- and those with an appropriately entrepreneurial bent would have wondered why a TLD was so valuable to those two groups. ICANN can't buy that kind of outreach (though I fully agree that it didn't even try). But lack of ICANN outreach does not mean that those who could have applied (but didn't) were unaware.
Eliminating wishful thinking (for instance, expecting that developing-world entrepreneurs would react to the same stimuli -- in the same way -- as developed-world ones) from the discussion would indeed "take us very far" in really analysing whether the current path of iCANN wrt gTLDs is in the global public good. There are numerous core assumptions behind ICANN policy that, I submit, are simply out-of-whack with the Real World -- and nowhere is evidence of this disjoint more apparent than in developing economies.
Dismissal of such premises -- without disproving them -- does not make the discussion go away. It just forces such debate outside the bubble, to other forums in which you're not a participant. And some of those emerging forums are a direct threat to ICANN and the multi-stakeholder model.
- Evan