HI all

I take the opposite view. ICANN could, if it had to deal with such a situation, do its work with a far smaller staff complement and funding base than it does, and if it were ever in a situation of needing to 'shut down', its existing reserve funds are *more* than adequate to the task.

If domain name registrations suddenly fall precipitously, we are not all going to be able to carry on as usual. There is a moral hazard to ICANN having a too-big reserve. It means it is insulated from those market pressures. I don't think that is good for ICANN or for the Internet.

To be clear, the situation I am talking about is if something fundamental changes. I'm not saying today's ICANN with today's market characteristics is the right or wrong size. My point only is that in extremis it could be run much more tightly, and I would prefer that, to oceans of money sitting on the balance sheet in perpetuity.

cheers

Jordan

On Mon, 20 Apr 2020 at 13:39, Stephen Deerhake @ ASNIC <sdeerhake@nic.as> wrote:

Greetings Nick,

You have hit on the core issue. I have been banging the drum on this for some time now, including an appearance at a Board public forum a few ICANN meetings ago (I cannot remember which) where I stated directly that they should put ALL the auction proceeds into the reserve fund. As I recall, the grand compromise was to take “some” from the auction proceeds, and fund the rest over “X” years from the ICANN budget.

For the record, my view is straightforward: ICANN should keep it all as a reserve, particularly in this crazy economic time resulting from COVID-19.

Thank you for raising this concern on the Council list. It’s serious business…

Best Regards,

/Stephen

From: Nick Wenban-Smith <Nick.Wenban-Smith@nominet.uk>
Date: Friday, April 17, 2020 at 10:27
To: Katrina Sataki <katrina@nic.lv>, "Stephen Deerhake @ ASNIC" <sdeerhake@nic.as>, ccnso-council <ccnso-council@icann.org>
Subject: RE: [ccnso-council] CCWG Auctionn Proceeds --Followup to my remarks on today's call

Yes thanks Stephen – another obvious issue for me is whether Covid changes any or all of this? I mean if ICANN ever needed a proper contingency $$$ sum held in reserve then now would be the time to have it, and to instead press on with distribution based on assumptions from back in 2014 or whenever just seems nuts.

[snip]

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