"Millions of dollars of PR value"? What exactly does that mean, Paul? More to the point: How is ICANN funded? Unless I'm mistaken, they are funded by registrar/registry fees and, yes, application for new TLD fees, all of which comes from a healthy domain industry. That's not to say that ICANN shouldn't or couldn't fund technical work of course, but let's be clear about how the money is actually flowing. And with sponsorship money comes a whole lot of things that we geeks have typically wanted to stay well clear of such as "value" for the sponsors in a number of different ways, but yes, I agree we may not be able to stay pure forever. The press release may not have mentioned the IETF, but the work of the technical community certainly WAS mantioned directly as well as indirectly during this entire event. Maybe we should ask Thomas Narten to summarise this for us, he is the IETF-ICANN liaison. Ole Ole J. Jacobsen Editor and Publisher, The Internet Protocol Journal Cisco Systems Tel: +1 408-527-8972 Mobile: +1 415-370-4628 E-mail: ole@xxxxxxxxx URL: http://www.cisco.com/ipj On Sat, 31 Oct 2009, Paul Hoffman wrote: > At 2:55 AM -0700 10/31/09, Ole Jacobsen wrote: > >You're not the first one to suggest that, but they do have a very > >different "business model" including covering travel for certain > >people and charging no meeting fees. It might make sense for us to > >approach the "domain industry" directly though... > > The "domain industry" does not profit from the IETF work nearly as > much as ICANN does. Take the past two day's of press coverage for > ICANN, for example. They are being lauded for making the domain name > system usable in other scripts as if this was their doing. Nothing > in ICANN's press releases pointed out that literally tens of > thousands of hours of volunteer time had been spent by the IETF over > the past decade to make this work. > > ICANN gets millions of dollars of PR value from the work that the > IETF does, whereas the "domain industry" gets very little. ICANN > should strongly consider helping pay for that work. > > --Paul Hoffman, Director > --VPN Consortium > _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf