>>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. ... >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). Um, the IETF is funded by the domain industry right now. The .ORG domain is owned by PIR, which funnels its surplus to ISOC, which uses a part of that to fund the IETF. The 2009 ISOC budget says that nearly all their revenue comes from .ORG, $15M from PIR vs $1.7M from everything else. They budget $1.4 million to cover a combination of IETF/IASA operations and $260K for IETF capital projects which I gather means tools. The budget predicits a roughly constant IETF contrubution other than tools, and an ISOC surplus of over $1M/yr going forward, despite ramping up a lot of other projects. I get the impression that in view of the gusher of cash arriving from PIR, if the IETF presented a reasonable case for getting more money from the ISOC, it would be hard for them to say no. Over in ICANN land, the domain money arrives roughly half through the registries, which mostly means Verisign, with Afilias (who handles the back end for .ORG as well as other domains) and Neustar being the other significant ones. The other half comes from registrars, Godaddy, NSI, etc. ICANN, despite its nominal non-profit status, is vastly profitable. The current FY10 budget has revenue of $63M, spending $57M, with $5M left over. They expect their revenue just from .COM registry fees to go from $12M to $18M due to raising the fee. The budget for IANA, which also includes software tools used elsewhere in ICANN, is $5M. To put it in perspective, that's about the same as the entire IETF. It includes $150K spent on a consultant to tell them about IANA's "business excellence", whatever that is. If the IETF wants more money from ISOC or ICANN, it shouldn't be hard to get. It would need some discipline to put together a budget, some material on why it should be funded more from subsidy than from increasing the meeting fees, and then go pitch it to our pals at ISOC and ICANN. R's, John _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf