At 01:17 PM 2/16/99 +1200, you wrote:
>At 15:48 15/02/99 +0000, Dr Nii Quaynor wrote:
>>Can we realistically have an ICANN without corporate sponsorship? Why is
>>corporate sponsorship considered harmful in this case? How can the perceived
>>dangers of corporate sponsorship be contained?
>>
I'd suggest that the question is now whether we can have a NewCorp without
corporate sponsorship. I'd also suggest that if we do not, then the harms
suggested by Joop Teernstra will occur: NewCorp will necessarily become
captive to those who pay the bills.
In the U. S. and every other country, that has been the consistent history
when any government operation is sought to be privatized. The government
officials involved either (a) don't understand the marketplace forces at work,
the struggle for survival in the business world, power struggles, and the plum
being presented for exploitation of the "great unwashed," or (b) those factors
are understood perfectly well, and graft and corruption abound: the powers
that be make their choices and then with their proceeds go off to retire in
Bimini or wherever. I'm not suggesting that the latter is likely in this case,
and here are other possibilities as well, but those two stand out.
NewCorp must be adequately funded by the USG, as ICANN was not, and
for a sufficient length of time that it can earn the confidence of the Internet
community. Given that result, NewCorp could become self-supporting not
by corporate doles but rather by fees paid as a part of all domain name
registrations and other services provided. That is a calm, cool, collected
way of doing it -- a way in which NewCorp will not have hit a gold mine,
and those seeking to become NewCorp will have sought to do so as a
means of perpetuating the Internet, not as a corporate get-rich-scheme
or a power grabbing ego trip, i.e., becoming "Emperor of the Internet.
Above all, NewCorp must be a dedicated non-profit, never to have its
name in NASDAQ while pretending ownership of all that its initial USG
funding permitted it to gather up, this latter of course being NSI, aka
NETSOL.
Again, as to ICANN, is it not understood that a possible result of the
NTIA meeting is that ICANN will disappear? The action that counts is
now March 10 in D. C.
Bill Lovell
