Changing the status quo (was: The European Commission Papers on ICANN)
This may sound strange coming from me but: What about developing stronger joint agendas with the NCSG. There are more than a hundred people in there now, a lot of new blood -- it's not just the handful of usual suspects. Some of the intellectual divides are starting to fall as well regards the anonymity-uber-alles ideology. And there is the new NPOC, which is what the consumer constituency could have been, if it had been given real board support and its board-appointed overseer had been given a mandate like Debbie Hughes was, rather than noodling for three years about what a consumer is. I mean, check out their freakin' web site: http://www.npoc.org/ It's a thing of beauty! And they have some substantial membership. I would recommend for Dakar getting Debbie Hughes, their chair, or someone from their leadership over to talk about issues [and NOT GNSO structure]. What the NPOC as an ally can offer us, at least at the GNSO level, is a vector into consumer issues where they intersect with non-profits and business. Allow me to explain: in my view, there is some commonality of issues between consumers, i.e. regular human beings who we are supposed to represent, and business, and non-profit operations. That commonality is: concern about domain name abuse; concern about cybersquatting and fraud (a major issue for the Red Cross is trademark protection, to prevent people being defrauded in developing countries by phony Red Cross sites), fast-flux and other things we are commonly told by the contracted parties are "outside ICANN's scope" [you should all understand by now that's code for: threatens to mess with someone's revenue stream]. The more we could get at-large aligned with the GAC and the NCSG or NPOC on certain issues, the more chance at-large has to be taken more seriously and not viewed as some appendage created by ICANN to conjure the illusion of multi-stakeholder participation. By the way, given my history, the person to do that is not me. At least not from the front. -----Original Message-----
From: "John R. Levine" <johnl@iecc.com> Sent: Sep 8, 2011 9:09 AM To: Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond <ocl@gih.com> Cc: NA Discuss <na-discuss@atlarge-lists.icann.org> Subject: Re: [NA-Discuss] FW: The European Commission Papers on ICANN
The question I therefore ask you and all of the cynics is, "how do we change that"?
From within the ALAC? We can't. We have no influence other than at the margins.
You'll notice the ALAC recently released a joint statement with the GAC.
Yup, the GAC has actual influence. To the extent we can nudge them, that would be useful.
I remain convinced that we have more resources than any other constituency in ICANN due to our extraordinary membership. We are the world.
Not to be unduly crass, but we have no budget. In all the consituencies that matter, people get paid to lobby ICANN.
Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly ------ NA-Discuss mailing list NA-Discuss@atlarge-lists.icann.org https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/na-discuss
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That would be a great idea - we just need someone to lead this up. D Darlene A. Thompson Community Access Program Administrator Nunavut Dept. of Education / N-CAP P.O. Box 1000, Station 910 Iqaluit, NU X0A 0H0 Phone: (867) 975-5631 Fax: (867) 975-5610 E-mail: dthompson@gov.nu.ca -----Original Message----- From: na-discuss-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org [mailto:na-discuss-bounces@atlarge-lists.icann.org] On Behalf Of Beau Brendler Sent: Thursday, September 08, 2011 9:44 AM To: John R. Levine; Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond Cc: NA Discuss Subject: [NA-Discuss] Changing the status quo (was: The European Commission Papers on ICANN) This may sound strange coming from me but: What about developing stronger joint agendas with the NCSG. There are more than a hundred people in there now, a lot of new blood -- it's not just the handful of usual suspects. Some of the intellectual divides are starting to fall as well regards the anonymity-uber-alles ideology. And there is the new NPOC, which is what the consumer constituency could have been, if it had been given real board support and its board-appointed overseer had been given a mandate like Debbie Hughes was, rather than noodling for three years about what a consumer is. I mean, check out their freakin' web site: http://www.npoc.org/ It's a thing of beauty! And they have some substantial membership. I would recommend for Dakar getting Debbie Hughes, their chair, or someone from their leadership over to talk about issues [and NOT GNSO structure]. What the NPOC as an ally can offer us, at least at the GNSO level, is a vector into consumer issues where they intersect with non-profits and business. Allow me to explain: in my view, there is some commonality of issues between consumers, i.e. regular human beings who we are supposed to represent, and business, and non-profit operations. That commonality is: concern about domain name abuse; concern about cybersquatting and fraud (a major issue for the Red Cross is trademark protection, to prevent people being defrauded in developing countries by phony Red Cross sites), fast-flux and other things we are commonly told by the contracted parties are "outside ICANN's scope" [you should all understand by now that's code for: threatens to mess with someone's revenue stream]. The more we could get at-large aligned with the GAC and the NCSG or NPOC on certain issues, the more chance at-large has to be taken more seriously and not viewed as some appendage created by ICANN to conjure the illusion of multi-stakeholder participation. By the way, given my history, the person to do that is not me. At least not from the front. -----Original Message-----
From: "John R. Levine" <johnl@iecc.com> Sent: Sep 8, 2011 9:09 AM To: Olivier MJ Crepin-Leblond <ocl@gih.com> Cc: NA Discuss <na-discuss@atlarge-lists.icann.org> Subject: Re: [NA-Discuss] FW: The European Commission Papers on ICANN
The question I therefore ask you and all of the cynics is, "how do we change that"?
From within the ALAC? We can't. We have no influence other than at the margins.
You'll notice the ALAC recently released a joint statement with the GAC.
Yup, the GAC has actual influence. To the extent we can nudge them, that would be useful.
I remain convinced that we have more resources than any other constituency in ICANN due to our extraordinary membership. We are the world.
Not to be unduly crass, but we have no budget. In all the consituencies that matter, people get paid to lobby ICANN.
Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly ------ NA-Discuss mailing list NA-Discuss@atlarge-lists.icann.org https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/na-discuss
Visit the NARALO online at http://www.naralo.org ------
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Funny you should mention this. The issue has been raised at the last ALAC executive meeting call about meeting with non-domain-industry components of the GNSO. In Singapore there was a surprising (to me) amount of shared goals found in a meeting with the Business Constituency. We are explicitly working on doing more with the NCSG, but nothing final yet. Note: Our partnerships sometime appear to be quite ... dynamic. There is significant concern within the NCUC (some of it expressed directly to me in a "how could you *betray* us!?!" conversation during a San Francisco taxi ride) regarding our new-found common ground with the GAC. I hope the new blood indicated by Beau may mitigate this challenge. - Evan
The trade press is all a-buzz (I would say a-twitter, but, whatever) because VRSN cancelled appearances at investor conferences, something a company normally only does if it has big news it can't talk about: http://www.fiercetelecom.com/story/verisign-conference-cancellations-ignite-... Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly
Catching my eye from the article: *The other possibility is VeriSign will be acquired by a private equity firm, which could purchase the company and revamp it to become profitable * Does this imply that Verisign -- operator of the near-monopoly TLD -- is not profitable now? If that is only partially correct, that doesn't offer much hope for the little ones about to start behind it. And the "revamping" could make the company more aggressive in the face of the new-TLD flood -- whatever form that takes, it also bodes poorly for the newcomers. - Evan On 8 September 2011 14:35, John R. Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
The trade press is all a-buzz (I would say a-twitter, but, whatever) because VRSN cancelled appearances at investor conferences, something a company normally only does if it has big news it can't talk about:
http://www.fiercetelecom.com/story/verisign-conference-cancellations-ignite-...
Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly ------ NA-Discuss mailing list NA-Discuss@atlarge-lists.icann.org https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/na-discuss
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Publicly available financial filings show that VeriSign is strongly profitable. R On Sep 8, 2011, at 11:54 AM, Evan Leibovitch wrote:
Catching my eye from the article:
*The other possibility is VeriSign will be acquired by a private equity firm, which could purchase the company and revamp it to become profitable *
Does this imply that Verisign -- operator of the near-monopoly TLD -- is not profitable now?
If that is only partially correct, that doesn't offer much hope for the little ones about to start behind it. And the "revamping" could make the company more aggressive in the face of the new-TLD flood -- whatever form that takes, it also bodes poorly for the newcomers.
- Evan
On 8 September 2011 14:35, John R. Levine <johnl@iecc.com> wrote:
The trade press is all a-buzz (I would say a-twitter, but, whatever) because VRSN cancelled appearances at investor conferences, something a company normally only does if it has big news it can't talk about:
http://www.fiercetelecom.com/story/verisign-conference-cancellations-ignite-...
Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly ------ NA-Discuss mailing list NA-Discuss@atlarge-lists.icann.org https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/na-discuss
Visit the NARALO online at http://www.naralo.org ------
------ NA-Discuss mailing list NA-Discuss@atlarge-lists.icann.org https://atlarge-lists.icann.org/mailman/listinfo/na-discuss
Visit the NARALO online at http://www.naralo.org ------
Publicly available financial filings show that VeriSign is strongly profitable.
In the December quarter, VRSN lost $40M on sales of $176M. In the March quarter, they made $40M on sales of $181M. In the June quarter they lost $10.6M on sales of $189M, so, no, they're not. It really is not helpful to make false assertions when you can look up the facts in 30 seconds. It's hard to figure out VRSN's long term financial picture because they've been shedding units like crazy, most notably the SSL cert business. In the September 2010 quarter they had a $741M adjustment for discontinued operations which I presume is the SSL business. In the three quarters since then, they've lost money, but they have huge interest expenses, $112M this quarter and they're in the process of buying a headquarters building for $118M. They have a billion dollars in cash and $584M in long term debt which doesn't strike me as good planning in this economy. So they're not profitable, but I think that is more likely due to all of the other stuff they're doing than to lack of cash flow from all those registrations. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly
The $112M interest expense contains approx $100M of "contingent interest" which significantly skews the results I was looking at the longer term performance of the domain business, however, which as a stand-alone unit is highly profitable. As you know, it's all the other stuff (which they've now largely divested) that has affected corporate profitability The discussion thread was about the likelihood of new TLD failure --- so my main point being the COM/ NET businesses are extremely unlikely to fail. Even very small registries can be run profitably if management control costs and keep to their knitting (in my opinion). R On Sep 9, 2011, at 8:50 AM, John R. Levine wrote:
Publicly available financial filings show that VeriSign is strongly profitable.
In the December quarter, VRSN lost $40M on sales of $176M. In the March quarter, they made $40M on sales of $181M. In the June quarter they lost $10.6M on sales of $189M, so, no, they're not. It really is not helpful to make false assertions when you can look up the facts in 30 seconds.
It's hard to figure out VRSN's long term financial picture because they've been shedding units like crazy, most notably the SSL cert business. In the September 2010 quarter they had a $741M adjustment for discontinued operations which I presume is the SSL business. In the three quarters since then, they've lost money, but they have huge interest expenses, $112M this quarter and they're in the process of buying a headquarters building for $118M. They have a billion dollars in cash and $584M in long term debt which doesn't strike me as good planning in this economy.
So they're not profitable, but I think that is more likely due to all of the other stuff they're doing than to lack of cash flow from all those registrations.
Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. http://jl.ly
participants (5)
-
Beau Brendler -
Evan Leibovitch -
John R. Levine -
Richard Tindal -
Thompson, Darlene