We, the leaders of Asia Pacific Internet Organizations, together with leaders of International organizations, representing Internet users from a wide range of linguistic cultural and ethnic communities including the Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Indian communities in the Asia Pacific region, hereby voice our concerns on the directorship in the ICANN Board. During the AP* Retreat in Bangkok, 20 to 23 October 2000, we note with extreme concern the disproportionate lack of representation of non-English speaking population groups on the ICANN board, and in some of the underlying support organizations of ICANN.

For example, the Arabic, Chinese, and Indian communities each represent over a billion people. Together, they account for over sixty percent (60%) of the world's population. Where is the representation? Despite the large membership in ICANN from the Asia Pacific region, there are no Asia Pacific representatives on the ICANN Board of Directors to present such issues. We would like to propose the introduction of Asia Pacific members into ICANN's Board of Directors through more equitable electoral and membership systems and processes that take into account the diversity of the Internet.

Representation at various levels of ICANN leadership is not commensurate with the total population or the rapidly growing population of Internet users. Representatives from our countries should be proportionally or at the very least, equitably present in the Board of Directors of ICANN to share, voice and attend to the concerns of these communities.

For whatever reasons (possibilities outlined in Appendix A), the election process, and, in fact, the basic structure of ICANN does not facilitate parity of representation.

We therefore request ICANN to form a Working Group to study this situation, and make recommendations for modifications in ICANN organizational structure and election mechanisms as may be appropriate to insure parity of representation in the ICANN process, from the Board Level through the supporting organization level.

We, the undersigned, are of a strong view that the above issues must be reviewed by the ICANN Board of Directors for immediate action and implementation in the coming months in order for sustainability of ICANN as an international corporation truly representative of the Internet. Only then can it be that credible and respected global entity that can claim true authority over the global information infrastructure that the Internet is today.

The AP* Participants include leaders of the following organizations:

In the Asia Pacific        

and International Organization

Appendix A

I. LACK OF TRANSPARENCY: ICANN INFORMATION AND PROCEDURAL CONTENT NOT IN THE NATIVE LANGUAGE

     38,000 members of ICANN are from the Asia Pacific region and most of these members do not use English as the primary form of communication. Thus, it is of great difficulty for these members to access ICANN information and subscribe to the membership and voting procedures of ICANN. However, ICANN currently does not address this issue and has made no attempt to rectify the situation in the past two years of its existence.

     We invite ICANN to work with the Asia Pacific Internet Organizations, many of which pre-date the existence of ICANN, to solve this problem expeditiously and increase the transparency of ICANN.

II. ELECTORAL DEFICIENCIES: VARIED POSTAL INFRASTRUCTURE AND INSUFFICIENT DURATION OF VOTING PROCESS

     In using postal mail to send the PIN upon membership into ICANN, there is a difficulty for members in certain Asia Pacific regions. The varied postal infrastructure from these regions cannot ensure timeliness of delivery of the PIN to the member and may even result in non-delivery in places where the postal infrastructure is not well-built. Also, in situations where the ICANN member may be temporarily away from his postal address, even when the PIN is delivered in the mail, the member will not be able to have access to and utilize the PIN. In view of the problems faced due to the varied postal infrastructure, there is an insufficient duration of time provided for in the voting process.

     Therefore, we posit that during the last elections held by ICANN, sufficient members of ICANN from our region have been denied access to the vote because of the failure of ICANN to address this issue. We invite a satisfactory statement from ICANN in response to this deficiency in the electoral procedure. In addition, we invite ICANN to form an electoral reform taskforce with members of our Asia Pacific Organizations and other interested international organizations.

III. MEMBERSHIP PROCEDURE INADEQUACIES: NON-ACCEPTANCE OF EMAIL IDENTIFICATION AS VERIFIED INFORMATION TO BE A MEMBER

      Currently, ICANN does not accept email identification as verifiable source of information for the purposes of membership. ICANN may wish to consider alternatives to using email verification. For emails originating from organizations in general, it would be relatively simple to determine the geographical location. For emails originating from more generic email providers (eg. Yahoo, Hotmail etc), the IP may be used to determine the location of the originator.