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Re: Circle of Fifths

2009-10-31 12:30:25
At 9:07 AM -0700 10/31/09, Ole Jacobsen wrote:
"Millions of dollars of PR value"? What exactly does that mean, Paul?

Legitimacy by publicity. Having their name (well, mostly their acronym) 
repeated in every news venue across the world. That legitimacy is just as 
important to ICANN as it is to, for example, an SDO.

More to the point: How is ICANN funded? Unless I'm mistaken, they are
funded by registrar/registry fees and, yes, application for new TLD
fees, all of which comes from a healthy domain industry. That's not to
say that ICANN shouldn't or couldn't fund technical work of course,
but let's be clear about how the money is actually flowing.

Fully agree. It is flowing from many smaller players into a central repository, 
ICANN. Thus, it makes more sense for that central repository to pay for the 
technical underpinnings on which it relies than to ask all the smaller players 
to pay a second tax (although them doing so would certainly be welcomed as 
well).

And with sponsorship money comes a whole lot of things that we geeks
have typically wanted to stay well clear of such as "value" for the
sponsors in a number of different ways, but yes, I agree we may not
be able to stay pure forever.

As if we ever were. Purity is a continuum. The IETF's leadership is funded by 
companies that are both generous *and* who see the value to themselves of 
having good leaders in their technical areas of interest. The same is true for 
the companies that contribute to ISOC; the vast majority of their corporate 
contributors are companies in the Internet technical realm who are both 
generous *and* who see the value to themselves. If that weren't the case, we 
would see many more large ISOC contributors from companies outside the tech 
field. For example, the large pharma companies get huge value out of the 
Internet existing, and often contribute to organizations that help others, but 
are nowhere to be found on  <http://www.isoc.org/orgs/members.php>.

The press release may not have mentioned the IETF, but the work of the
technical community certainly WAS mantioned directly as well as
indirectly during this entire event.

The latter is good to hear, but it s the former where ICANN gets their 
credibility in the world.

Maybe we should ask Thomas Narten
to summarise this for us, he is the IETF-ICANN liaison.

Nah, then he would appear on his own weekly summary of people posting here.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium
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