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Re: Circle of Fifths

2009-11-05 12:23:04
As near as I can make out, ICANN collects bucketloads of cash without
really having any idea why. The only rationale seemed to be to pay a
rather surprising large salary to the CEO.

Has ICANN managed to address its difficulty with supplier lock in for
the dotcom contract? Not that I am aware, they have not done what is
necessary to give themselves a choice of registrar when the contract
renews and so they will have no real choice but to award yet another
sole source contract to the incumbent contractor. Which Is suspect
rather suited the old management since it is much easier for an
organization that hands out contracts worth half a billion dollars a
year to pay their CEO the sums they did than it would be if the
contracts were rather more modest in size.

Has ICANN resolved the issues with DNS security? And here I do not
mean simply deployment of DNSSEC which will harm rather than hurt.

There is rather a long list of similar questions.


Given the tricky political situation that ICANN is in by its very
nature, given the even more precarious situation they have put
themselves in by their own decisions, given the fact that money is not
a scarce resource, a prudent board ICANN board would in my view be
buying all the friends and supporters they can while they are cheap.

Instead they are currently looking to raise even more money through
the sale of TLDs but last time I heard were curiously uninterested in
providing any material support to the root operators who would be
bearing the expense of supporting these new domains.



On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 11:07 AM, Ole Jacobsen <ole(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com> wrote:

"Millions of dollars of PR value"? What exactly does that mean, Paul?
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.

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.

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

Ole


Ole J. Jacobsen
Editor and Publisher,  The Internet Protocol Journal
Cisco Systems
Tel: +1 408-527-8972   Mobile: +1 415-370-4628
E-mail: ole(_at_)cisco(_dot_)com  URL: http://www.cisco.com/ipj



On Sat, 31 Oct 2009, Paul Hoffman wrote:

At 2:55 AM -0700 10/31/09, Ole Jacobsen wrote:
You're not the first one to suggest that, but they do have a very
different "business model" including covering travel for certain
people and charging no meeting fees. It might make sense for us to
approach the "domain industry" directly though...

The "domain industry" does not profit from the IETF work nearly as
much as ICANN does. Take the past two day's of press coverage for
ICANN, for example. They are being lauded for making the domain name
system usable in other scripts as if this was their doing. Nothing
in ICANN's press releases pointed out that literally tens of
thousands of hours of volunteer time had been spent by the IETF over
the past decade to make this work.

ICANN gets millions of dollars of PR value from the work that the
IETF does, whereas the "domain industry" gets very little. ICANN
should strongly consider helping pay for that work.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--VPN Consortium

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