Re: [ga] FYI

[DPF <david@farrar.com>]

I tend to agree with Robert's very well made points but have a concern
about the North American Region and the ccNSO bylaws.

North America, using UN criteria, has only five member ccTLDs.  They
would be:

Bermuda (.bm)
Canada (.ca)
Greenland (.gl)
Saint Pierre and Miquelon (.pm)
United States (.us)

Under ICANN proposal there would be slightly more, eight:

American Samoa (.as)
Canada (.ca)
Guam (.gu)
Northern Mariana Islands (.mp)
Puerto Rico (.pr)
US Minor Outlying Islands (.um)
United States (.us)
Virgin Islands US (.vi)

Now the problem is that Article XX of the proposed bylaws says that at
least four ccTLDs in each Region must join the ccNSO before it is
"quorate".

This means under the geographic proposal that just two out of five
ccTLDs in North America can stop the ccNSO even if the rest of the
world joins up.   

One of these (.pm) is actually run by AFNIC.  .gl appears to be a tiny
affair as their iso3166 page was last updated in 1997.  I apologise if
I am wrong but I don't recall them being active in ccTLD discussions
at all.  Likewise I can not recall how active, if at all, Bermuda is.

So my concern is that using the UN model, one may never get a ccNSO -
not because there is opposition to it, but just because there are not
enough active ccTLDs in North America.

Even using the ICANN model with 8 ccTLDs in North America, this is
still a high threshold of 50% must join up to be able to form the
ccNSO.  Again some of these ccTLDs are very small (.um and .mp) and
not very active.  Does anyone have any data on how many NA ccTLDs have
for example turned up to an ICANN meeting or participated on the
cctld-discuss list?


DPF


On Fri, 20 Jun 2003 18:36:21 +0000, "Roberto Gaetano"
<ploki_xyz@hotmail.com> wrote:

>Good evening.
>For your information, further to my previous comment to the proposed changes 
>to the geographical regions, I have sent the attached comment.
>Regards
>Roberto
>
>------------------------------------------------
>
>Good evening.
>I would like to substantiate my position, expressed already, about keeping 
>the territories geographically located in a different Region than the mother 
>country where they are, and not moving them in a different geographic 
>region.
>I would like to call your attention to an international treaty that 
>indirectly addresses this matter: the treaty of Tlatelolco 
>(http://www.opanal.org/opanal/Tlatelolco/Tlatelolco-i.htm). If you check the 
>Additional Protocol I 
>(http://www.opanal.org/opanal/Tlatelolco/Tlatelolco-i.htm#35), you will 
>notice that this engages States that have territories in Latin America and 
>Caribbean. While the signatories are the States (so far France, the 
>Netherlands, UK and US, as in 
>http://www.opanal.org/opanal/Tlatelolco/status-i.htm) that are, de jure or 
>de facto, internationally responsible for territories in LAC, the treaty 
>applies only to said territories, creating a juridical distinction between, 
>for instance, France (FR) and French Guyane (GF). The residents of the 
>French Guyane are protected by an international treaty against any direct or 
>indirect use of nuclear weapons in their territory (including testing or 
>storage), and this status is different from the one of their colleagues in 
>Metropolitan France.
>All this to say that for international law the common nationality is not a 
>sufficient reason for lumping together residents of different regions.
>As for the second problem, i.e. the question of Antartica, it can be 
>assigned to AP by redesigning AP to include AQ, but this only with the 
>agreement of Argentina and Chile. I just incidentally note that, if the same 
>logic that led to the assignment of GF to Europe had been applied to AQ, the 
>latter should have been split in the slices of different sovereignity. Of 
>course with terrible problems, because the slices themselves to not have an 
>ISO-3166 code. But again, this shows only that the "belonging to a country" 
>is an attribute and not a property of a territory. On the other hand, 
>geographical location is a property (assuming we can limit our observation 
>to few thousand years), and therefore should remain the guiding factor.
>Regards
>Roberto Gaetano
>
>_________________________________________________________________
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