ICANN's GNSO approves neocolonial restrictions on support for gTLD applicants from developing economies!
Today, the GNSO rejected a motion on a charter extension to the Joint AC/SO Working Group for gTLD Applicants from Developing Economies (JAS WG) that might have actually provided assistance for new applicants from developing economies. Instead they approved a charter extension that only provides a single kind of aid. The only type of help they approved was aid that would be provided by or through an incumbent partner or an established consultant.
Many of the types of aid approved in the ALAC charter extensions were excluded!
No application fee reductions;
No fund raising in order to give material assistance;
No use of windfall profits from auctions to help applicants from developing economies;
No help in establishing coordinated efforts by applicants from developing economies.
The only kind of aid the JAS WG is allowed to work on is aid that makes a applicant from a developing economy beholden and subject to the control of an incumbent or an expert.
In other words, the only type of aid the GNSO approved is neocolonial aid.
Neocolonialism is a method by which corporations and multinational corporations from developed nations find ways, such as partnerships and advisor-ships, to exploit the resources of post-colonial developing economies. The new gTLDs, especially those IDN gTLDs using local scripts and languages, are a rich resource open to exploitation. By making partnering the only way to get assistance, the incumbent will gain some share of every new gTLD that requires aid. Further, by not providing material aid, local populations will be at a disadvantage in developing their own linguistic and cultural resources, leaving those resources as low hanging fruit available for incumbents.
Restricting the type of assistance to partnerships and advisors, though these can be an ingredient of a full program that includes material assistance, is a form of neocolonialism. This is the case even if those in the Contracted Parties House (CPH) who tabled this motion and those in Non Contracted Parties House (NCPH) who went along with the motion and voted for it, do not know it is neocolonialism. Even if exploitation was the furthest thing from anyone's mind and they were only thinking of what was good for the incumbents and for their stakeholders, it is neocolonialism and it ignores the needs of developing economies.
And it is wrong.
What it is not, is a development conscious action!
What it is not, is a response to the GAC's advice that the new gTLD program be made accessible to developing economies!
The GNSO council went even further in that the motion that they approved gags the JAS WG by barring it from conveying its recommendations to the ICANN Board, the GAC or the community at large without first getting the approval of the GNSO. It might even gag the WG from being able to put out a statement regarding the utter inadequacy of the motion approved by the GNSO. The GNSO, in the process of protecting its gTLD sovereignty and its access to developing economy resources, is instituting military style top down chains of command in the ICANN bottom up organization.
These were the first major decision of the new 2011 GNSO council.
This does not bode well.