Re: [registrars] ICANN DNSO Budget & Its impact on the Registrar Constituancy

["Ross Wm. Rader" <ross@tucows.com>]

Ken/All,

It should also be noted that the motion carried - which means that the
request has been endorsed as a 2/3 consensus vote by the NC and passed on to
ICANN - which has the effect of not requiring minority views to be passed on
with the proposition. It does allow us to table our dissenting views for
inclusion in the record however...Ken, what are the chances that the ASO and
PSO are going to buy into/oppose this proposition? A bottom-up/self-funding
model seems to be intuitively more efficient than what was proposed today
but this would favor commercially oriented constituencies over others -
which can be double edged. As much as we are commercial interests, the
non-coms and individuals buy product from us in significant quantities.
Their weaknesses could turn into our weaknesses.

I was disappointed that our vote was, in effect, nullified by the voting
pattern of our reps. The tally by my count was 14-3 in favor, but with one
of our reps voting yes, one voting no and the other one not present, our
view was somewhat muted.

As BobC would say :(

-rwr

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ken Stubbs" <kstubbs@digitel.net>
To: <Registrars@dnso.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2001 10:26 AM
Subject: [registrars] ICANN DNSO Budget & Its impact on the Registrar
Constituancy


Fellow Registrars....

In the Names Council meeting Today i Voted against a request to have ICANN
fund approx $170,000 of the DNSO budget for the next year.

As you are all well aware, a substantial amount of the ICANN budget is
funded thru assessments on the registrar constituency (approx 50%).  This
means that of any increase in the ICANN budget, 50 cents of each dollar is
assessed to the Registrars.

Each constituency should pay its fair share of the DNSO operation and this
proposal would pass a substantial burden from the other constituencies over
to our constituency and I do not feel this is appropriate.

In my opinion, ICANN staff supported my position as well and I would not
expect the proposal to transfer this burden to be approved.

Today's actions only reinforces my concerns that there may be attempts this
year to impose additional financial burdens for ICANN operations & outreach
(i.e. at large outreach) on us and we Registrars need to be even more
pro-active.

The impact on the registrars could be very significant if we do not  work
hard and organize for increased participation by ALL of our members in
lobbying & advocating within ICANN to prevent this from happening.

Some constituencies (i.e. Business & Non-Commercial) have the  attitude that
they support ICANN thru the purchase of domain names thru us and we
registrars should use the funds that we collect from the end user to support
ICANN and that they should not be asked to fund ICANN thru their
constituencies. I disagree strongly with this view.

We are not allowed to pass these ICANN assessments thru to our customers as
additional charges (as Telco's are currently allowed to do) and as such are
forced in many cases to "eat" these expenses.

It is for exactly the reasons I point out above that ALL the members of the
constituency need to be aware of these issues and work hard to keep us from
being additionally burdened.



Ken Stubbs