At 9:07 AM -0700 10/31/09, Ole Jacobsen wrote: >"Millions of dollars of PR value"? What exactly does that mean, Paul? Legitimacy by publicity. Having their name (well, mostly their acronym) repeated in every news venue across the world. That legitimacy is just as important to ICANN as it is to, for example, an SDO. >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. Fully agree. It is flowing from many smaller players into a central repository, ICANN. Thus, it makes more sense for that central repository to pay for the technical underpinnings on which it relies than to ask all the smaller players to pay a second tax (although them doing so would certainly be welcomed as well). >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. As if we ever were. Purity is a continuum. The IETF's leadership is funded by companies that are both generous *and* who see the value to themselves of having good leaders in their technical areas of interest. The same is true for the companies that contribute to ISOC; the vast majority of their corporate contributors are companies in the Internet technical realm who are both generous *and* who see the value to themselves. If that weren't the case, we would see many more large ISOC contributors from companies outside the tech field. For example, the large pharma companies get huge value out of the Internet existing, and often contribute to organizations that help others, but are nowhere to be found on <http://www.isoc.org/orgs/members.php>. >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. The latter is good to hear, but it s the former where ICANN gets their credibility in the world. > Maybe we should ask Thomas Narten >to summarise this for us, he is the IETF-ICANN liaison. Nah, then he would appear on his own weekly summary of people posting here. --Paul Hoffman, Director --VPN Consortium _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf