On Mar 22, 2015, at 11:58 AM, Sam Lanfranco <sam@lanfranco.net> wrote:
Steve,
Thank you for your response. I had posed the question because ICANN gTLD auctions are linked to another ICANN issue. That is the potential for ICANN to have funding to assist disadvantaged regions or constituencies with regard to the DNS system at various levels (gTLDs, registries, registrar, etc.). I will offer a short paragraph of my analysis around these two linked issues, gTLD auctions and ICANN funding for "good works".
The previous gTLD round discussion produced the option of an ICANN gTLD auction. A small amount of funding was raised and has been set aside while ICANN explores ways of using it. Going forward such funding is unlikely to grow. First, the overall revenue from the new gTLDs has been more modest than hoped for, as diminishing marginal returns have set in. Second, for strings in contention the contenders are resorting to private auctions, where the winner pays the losers, and none of those proceeds accrue to ICANN. The existence of the private auctions appears to make ICANN auctions a moot point, an irrelevant issue, and seriously impacts on any notion of an ICANN "good works" fund.
Sam
Although this discussion group is more to raise issues than to solve them, there are 2 specific substance comments applicable here: 1) ICANN can't tie forecast auction revenues to actual commitment to support. So, either ICANN use one round auction revenue to fund good works, either during its ongoing operations or in the next round, or ICANN would need to classify who is more deserving, and then support those or not depending on how much it actually earns. 2) ICANN always classified its auction as a last resort and told applications to preferably sort out contention sets among themselves. The fact that most private solutions usually comes just before the string goes to auction implies that the it actually works towards putting a time pressure on applicants, so they are not irrelevant. Also, if ICANN was to forbid private settlements, there would always be room for collusion since applicants have the necessary information to reach each other. Avoid gaming here would require more changes like not listing who are the applicants, only the number of applicants; on the other hand, that would prevent the community from commenting the applications that would only display the string... I don't see this going towards a way the community would accept it. What I would see as positive for a 2nd round would be knowing the destination of the ICANN auctions money beforehand instead of an unknown process targeted at unknown causes. Rubens