TR: Une "Fondation DNS" aliment ée par l'ICANN ?
Hello all Reacting to a couple of posts, sorry if this is a bit long and a repeat for some (e.g. those who have read http://www.w3.org/2005/02/W3C-Global-Focus.html). Adam:
W3C is an industry association, doesn't the Internet industry think it worth supporting? Not as if it's an industry short on cash
W3C is a standard body, much like the IETF, or the Unicode consortium. (that is, if you believe TCP/IP, XML, UTF, etc. are standards) We are funded by various sources: - membership fee (roughly 2/3 or our revenue, a third US, a third software IT, not the same third - check http://www.w3.org/Consortium/about-w3c.html), paying members are harder to sign in since 2000 as you may imagine - a third coming from specific external grants (e.g. for Web Accessibility for People with Disabilities, Mobile Web in Developing countries, I18N, etc), - or from end-user supporters, or event sponsoring, (our meetings are free for their participants) Much like the IETF, we receive no government ICT standard money (coming from citizen's taxes), it all goes to more official bodies (ITU or ISO's chapters for instance). W3C is a joint project between about 20 non-for-profit institutes world wide (our hosts and offices), whose productions (e.g. XML, HTML, http, URLs, CSS, Web2API, WebServices, SemanticWeb, etc) are free for all (not just free access, but royalty free) and generate a lot of profit in lots of communities, including the near-by DNS community. The funding we receive goes in a pot, which is in turn used to pay a staff of about 100 folks around the world (like me, or our director Tim Berners-Lee), who manage about 100 groups, for a total expert population of about 1500 folks (with 500 free participants). The pot is also used to pay for comm, qa, system/servers, big meetings, and free/open source tools (e.g. validator.w3.org, and various other operational resources). In case it is not clear: there is no free lunch. IETF is also funded by the industry, and also has mgnt and technical staff (gardians of their RFC bylaws), and comm staff (ISOC, etc), and mgnt (IAB, etc), etc, but most of these staff are loaned by its membership, and its sister organisations, rather than organized as a consortium like W3C. We have of course technical liaisons and joint groups together, and we operate under the same "rough consensus and running code" motto. I believe it would be good for the DNS governance bodies to invest in organisations like us, doing Internet&Web std. We are one family of folks responsible for the long term stability of the entire Internet&Web platform, and I think the std developpers have in the past 20 years shown a good return on investment wrt quality and adoption (compared to what the real governments have paid in the sixties and seventies for non-IP network and applications standardisation). Not to mention that we've been a protocol supporting and technical liaison for ICANN since its inception. This is getting too long already.. All I'm saying is that: Guess what a billion potential programmers brought by one happy root wants every Xmas ? more Open Web standards :) 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 fine with the idea of funding several "good for the Internet community actions" with these DNS auction extra-benefits (single letter or new TLDs). Even if we, W3C, don't get anything out of a DNS trust, if we just drop the entire idea and go find our support somewhere else, I would think that selling rare DNS resources a high price on the free market and re-investing the money in the DNS foudations (whatever you think they are) is a smart move. You'll understand that my focus is on Open Web Standardization support, as a foundation layer among others, and in the Internet dev community in general. Cheers, and Happy new year to all. Ps: I'll be in Delhi for those of you who wants to chat f2f - and if I find an affordable hotel :|
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 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/ <--------
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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Adam Peake ha scritto:
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.
I understand your point and I actually tend to agree with it, but there is another theory that says that the "cost" of these names is just like that of any other name, so any special pricing above that is a form of added taxation, or license fee or however you might want to call it. For this to be a "sale of assets" as you put it, you have to imply that ICANN and/or the registry own all unregistered / reserved domain names... -- vb. Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu <-------- --------> finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/ <--------
At 10:50 AM +0100 1/22/08, Vittorio Bertola wrote:
Adam Peake ha scritto:
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.
I understand your point and I actually tend to agree with it, but there is another theory that says that the "cost" of these names is just like that of any other name, so any special pricing above that is a form of added taxation, or license fee or however you might want to call it. For this to be a "sale of assets" as you put it, you have to imply that ICANN and/or the registry own all unregistered / reserved domain names...
Unregistered names no, not at all. For reserved list names yes (probably!) Someone put those names on a reserved list which suggests someone had authority over those names at that time. Seems to imply ownership or right to control. For COM, NET and ORG that someone was the IANA acting on behalf of the Internet Community. Though I don't know what caused IANA to stick these names on a reserve list, was it an RFC, IETF discussion, or Jon Postel deciding it was a good thing, etc? Adam
-- vb. Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu <-------- --------> finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/ <--------
Answering my own question (thanks to pointer from Patrick Jones)
For COM, NET and ORG that someone was the IANA acting on behalf of the Internet Community. Though I don't know what caused IANA to stick these names on a reserve list, was it an RFC, IETF discussion, or Jon Postel deciding it was a good thing, etc?
<http://ops.ietf.org/lists/namedroppers/namedroppers.199x/msg01156.html> Adam
Adam
-- vb. Vittorio Bertola - vb [a] bertola.eu <-------- --------> finally with a new website at http://bertola.eu/ <--------
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I understand your point and I actually tend to agree with it, but there is another theory that says that the "cost" of these names is just like that of any other name, so any special pricing above that is a form of added taxation, or license fee or however you might want to call it.
If these names are offered for sale, they're going to be auctioned to the highest bidders. The only question is who's going to get the money. I would be surprised if the auction raised as much as $20 million (look at the three existing single letter domains q.com, x.com. and z.com after all) but that's still enough that it's worth thinking about where best to direct the money. R's, John
One thing ICANN could fund certainly is an open licensed font which has the complete IDN set. So it is easy for all browsers, applications to implement IDN in a consistent manner. -- -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Franck Martin franck.martin@gmail.com http://www.peachymango.org/ "Toute connaissance est une réponse à une question" G. Bachelard
participants (5)
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Adam Peake -
Daniel Dardailler -
Franck Martin -
John L -
Vittorio Bertola