During AP* retreat meeting, there is discussion about .tamil which is one of the Indian languages spoken by over 100 million people. The TLD for .arabic language spoken by over one billion people world wide was also mentioned. These are new topics. Peter de Blanc commented that we should ask opinion from ccTLD managers and suggested to draft a statement to ICANN related to .tamil and .arabic. Peter Dengate Thrush commented that .eu tld should not be treated like .ps. We should notify ICANN.

Kilnam explained that if you are interested in applying new TLD, there will be a ISO Committee (TC46) to approve and finally end up in ISO3166 list. ISO no longer publishes the complete list of reserved character strings on the web. Peter de Blanc has the list if anyone is interested. As for .ap for asia-pacific, we can not apply since there is no government for .ap, unlike .eu. And this is the basic rule for any new TLD.

Peter de Blanc suggested to set up motion to get new TLD by appointing Task force for Working Group to apply for regional TLD, like .eu. Also Working Group should look how to migrate from ISO3166 to rootserver. We need to ask this question to ICANN Board and what kind of procedure would involve. Ramesh mentioned that in asia we have a number of Asian organizations, like APEC, ASEAM, ASIAN, AP, how are we going to decide which is the right one?

Group should look how to migrate from ISO3166 to rootserver. Group wants to define the process by which a character string in ISO list migrates into the root server, and gets a delegated manager.

The meeting agreed to work together on the outreach program, workshop and translation of important documents. As for the outreach program, ccTLD and APTLD will come up with a statement as a joint program. APTLD is already doing the internet seminar and awareness program. We should establish some mechanism to work together. The meeting suggested that all the teaching materials and presentations should be archived and posted on the web. For workshop, there should be a good coordination. YJ commented that Europe was doing Workshop monthly and it was awfully good. And for translation, there is no need to translate similar documents twice. So a good coordination will reduce the cost of translation for both organizations.

As we all know that CENTR committed $850,000 to ICANN funding. CENTR did that without consulting ccTLD's AdCom at all. The question is what APTLD would do. The meeting suggested we inform ICANN our position. If we consider Yokohama meeting expenses paid by JPNIC which was about 4 - 500,000 USD, then ccTLD has paid the amount requested by ICANN. As for APTLD itself, APTLD paid around $600,000 including Japan's contribution to Yokohama meeting expense. Last year, Hotta sung mentioned that JPNIC donated $25,000 to ICANN and this year will probably be the same amount.

The meeting concluded that APTLD would put out a statement to ICANN. YJ volunteered to draft the statement.

The conclusion is that it's basically up to ccTLD draft position paper supported by as many ccTLDs as possible. If there is a merge or reduction in DNSO, we would be in a better position.

We decided to put an agenda item on the LA ccTLD meeting "Current and future status of ccTLD relationship with ICANN"