Funding IANA II

[richard@vrx.net (Richard J. Sexton )]

Jon;

In the document you recently circulated, you mentioned funding
and mentioned several possabilities: 1) government funding,
2) foundation funding, 3) memebership funding.

You stated 1) was "clearly unacceptible", without offering
a reason. This isn't clear to me, what reason where you
thinking of ?

2) is appealing, 3) is not. Allow me to explain why. It's
not like we have a shortage of TLDs people want to run,
or even fully functioning registries. After 4 years all
we're wating for is IANA (or IANAng - whatever) to
decide "yes, so and so, you're in, and the required
two pointers are added to A-ROOT. So, the notion of
registry wannabes having to pay people to decide
which names get in, when in reality the folks will
in all likelyhood spend the first few weeks/months
just getting up to speed (remind me to show you the
mail from one of the technical IAHC members asking what
an MX record is). This is bordering on ludicrous and
places an undue burdon on the potential registries that
have been delayed almost to death as it is.

What, in my opinion might make the most sense is an idea
Stef put forth at a meeting with Ira and a bunch of the
ORSC poeple last winter in New York. In a nutshell,
a foundaiton is set up to administer the Intellectual
Infrastructure fund. It, in turn could administer
some money to fund the IANAng or names council or
whoever seems to need it. Then, in turn over a period
of a year or two a way could be found to make it self
supporting.

When Don Mitchell of the NSF created that fund, that
is more or less what it was for - "Intellectual Infrastructure"
meant "salaries".

The transisiton period we're in now is, as Ira correclty
categorized, the most difficult part of all this, and
given there is a whack of money just sitting there
and given that we wouldn't need but a fraction of it
and given the transitional nature of the current DNS
situation, it seems appropriate to me.