At 3:53 PM +0100 1/21/08, Vittorio Bertola wrote:
Daniel Dardailler ha scritto:
Vittorio:
.. I'm fine with ~$0.20 per domain, I'm fine with supporting developing country ccTLDs or the IGF (or the At Large ;) if there's enough coming from it, but no one tasked ICANN with being the Treasure Ministry of the Internet, let alone deciding how to redistribute money from the "undeserving" to the "deserving".
So this is about drawing the "deserving" line at a level we're all fine with. We're missing data here.
I'm just afraid that once you open the gates, you open the way to massive taxation
I think you should not use the word "tax" in connection with any sale of single letter second letter names. Taxation is a possibility for other things ICANN does (e.g. make a condition that the organization selected to run dot WEB will pay x cents per name to some good works fund -- and ALAC might want to take up that kind of behavior as a separate issue), but the single letter names are not among them. They'd be a sale of assets. No one would be taxed as a result of their sale, the entity buying would do so through their own choice. Important because tax is such an emotive word. As we saw when ICANN's first funding model proposal was killed. Questions ALAC might look at first are if the single letters should be taken off the reserve list? If made available should they be put up for sale or are there other ways to allocate them? Who owns the right to sell and make money from them? What to do with any revenue could be addressed at a level of principles. (My answers are Yes, Yes sale, IANA but the Internet Community/us/ICANN not US Govt. And cash for good works related to the Internet and domain name system, and I'd include W3C potentially in that.) I'm sure there are more questions. Talking potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. So there's a strong temptation to think about specifics of what to spend on. But that could be a distraction. Adam
of whatever resource allocation process could be necessary for the future, and you enter into disputes on what is "deserving" that are hard to solve. Why fund the standards organizations, say, and not the free software groups that give free operating systems, browers and other applications to everyone? And why not spend the money to fund the OLPC program and give laptops to children in the developing world? And what if by raising the cost of resources at the centre (since you have to collect money to fund more projects) you actually make it impossible for similar non-profit projects to develop independently at the edges?
I agree that, in practice, the line was already crossed when .org was awarded to ISOC... however ICANN was never designed with the objective of funding the growth of Internet architectures, and in recent years the number of people saying "ICANN should fund this" or "ICANN should fund that" has been increasing enough to make everyone a bit nervous. If ICANN is to put money into new kinds of funding efforts, there should be at least a clear and broadly supported agreement about the process through which it will decide what to tax, how much to raise and how to spend it. -- vb. Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu <-------- --------> finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/ <--------
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