[At-Large] TR: Une "Fondation DNS" aliment ée par l'ICANN ?

[Daniel Dardailler]

Hello all

Reacting to a couple of posts, sorry if this is a bit long and a repeat for some 
(e.g. those who have read http://www.w3.org/2005/02/W3C-Global-Focus.html).

Adam:

> W3C is an industry association, doesn't the
> Internet industry think it worth supporting?  Not
> as if it's an industry short on cash

W3C is a standard body, much like the IETF, or the Unicode consortium.
(that is, if you believe TCP/IP, XML, UTF, etc. are standards)

We are funded by various sources:
   - membership fee (roughly 2/3 or our revenue, a third US, a third software 
IT, not the same third  - check http://www.w3.org/Consortium/about-w3c.html), 
paying members are harder to sign in since 2000 as you may imagine
   - a third coming from specific external grants (e.g. for Web Accessibility
for People with Disabilities, Mobile Web in Developing countries, I18N, etc),
     - or from end-user supporters, or event sponsoring, (our meetings are free 
for their participants)

Much like the IETF, we receive no government ICT standard money (coming from
citizen's taxes), it all goes to more official bodies (ITU or ISO's chapters for 
instance).

W3C is a joint project between about 20 non-for-profit institutes world wide
(our hosts and offices), whose productions (e.g. XML, HTML, http, URLs,  CSS,
Web2API, WebServices, SemanticWeb, etc) are free for all (not just free access,
but royalty free) and generate a lot of profit in lots of communities, including
the near-by DNS community.

The funding we receive goes in a pot, which is in turn used to pay a staff of
about 100 folks around the world (like me, or our director Tim Berners-Lee), who
manage about 100 groups, for a total expert population of about 1500 folks (with
500 free participants). The pot is also used to pay for comm, qa,
system/servers, big meetings, and free/open source tools (e.g. validator.w3.org, 
and various other operational resources).

In case it is not clear: there is no free lunch. IETF is also funded by the
industry, and also has mgnt and technical staff (gardians of their RFC bylaws),
and comm staff (ISOC, etc), and mgnt (IAB, etc), etc, but most of these staff
are loaned by its membership, and its sister organisations, rather than
organized as a consortium like W3C. We have of course technical liaisons and
joint groups together, and we operate under the same "rough consensus and
running code" motto.

I believe it would be good for the DNS governance bodies to invest in
organisations like us, doing Internet&Web std. We are one family of folks 
responsible for the long term stability of the entire Internet&Web platform, and 
I think the std developpers have in the past 20 years shown a good return on 
investment wrt quality and adoption (compared to what the real governments have 
paid in the sixties and seventies for non-IP network and applications 
standardisation). Not to mention that we've been a protocol supporting and 
technical liaison for ICANN since its inception.

This is getting too long already..

All I'm saying is that: Guess what a billion potential programmers brought by 
one happy root wants every Xmas ? more Open Web standards :)

Vittorio:

> .. I'm fine with ~$0.20 per domain, I'm fine
> with supporting developing country ccTLDs or the IGF (or the At Large ;)
> if there's enough coming from it, but no one tasked ICANN with being the
> Treasure Ministry of the Internet, let alone deciding how to
> redistribute money from the "undeserving" to the "deserving".

So this is about drawing the "deserving" line at a level we're all fine with. 
We're missing data here.

I'm fine with the idea of funding several "good for the Internet community
actions" with these DNS auction extra-benefits (single letter or new TLDs).

Even if we, W3C, don't get anything out of a DNS trust, if we just drop the 
entire idea and go find our support somewhere else, I would think that selling 
rare DNS resources a high price on the free market and re-investing the money in 
the DNS foudations (whatever you think they are) is a smart move.

You'll understand that my focus is on Open Web Standardization support, as a 
foundation layer among others, and in the Internet dev community in general.


Cheers, and Happy new year to all.

Ps: I'll be in Delhi for those of you who wants to chat f2f - and if I find an
affordable hotel :|