[council] Matching funds

["Philip Sheppard" <philip.sheppard@aim.be>]

Please note the e-mail below from Versign.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Gomes, Chuck" <cgomes@verisign.com>
To: "'Philip Sheppard'" <philip.sheppard@aim.be>
Cc: "Cochetti, Roger" <RCochetti@verisign.com>; "'DNSO Secretariat'"
<DNSO.secretariat@dnso.org>
Sent: 01 March 2002 14:02


Philip,

Two years ago VeriSign announced that it would match any donations made to
support the work of ICANN's Domain Name Supporting Organization and Names
Council for up to $100,000.  The purpose of this note is to advise you, with
some regret, that the offer is hereby withdrawn.

We have felt for some time that one of the major issues facing the DNSO and
the Names Council is a lack of resources and that increased resources, while
not a solution to all of the DNSO's problems, would go a long way towards
ensuring the competent functioning of the Council and the provision to it of
more and better-researched information.  In particular, we thought that
increased resources would:
* Allow the Council to hire staff to take the lead in
developing and implementing well defined processes and procedures to
facilitate its consensus management role
* Minimize the amount of subjectivity and increase the amount
of measurable objective criteria in the consensus-building process
* Provide clearer direction for working groups, committees,
constituencies, etc.
* Make it more readily possible for the NC to perform its role
of managing the consensus-building process in a way that will create
increased confidence throughout the Internet community.

To encourage such donations, we offered to match any donation made by any
company or individual up to a total of $100,000.  Since the offer was first
made in 2000, we have repeated it and a fair amount of work was actually
done by Names Council committees to design a neutral structure to administer
whatever funds were received.

Despite repeated appeals, no commitments for funds were received except from
a couple members of the gTLD Registry Constituency.  This is all the more
disappointing given the fact that quite a few companies who are several
times larger than VeriSign have employees who sit on the Names Council and
participate in most of its committees; and that there are now nearly 100
gTLD registrars, eight gTLD registries, well over a hundred ccTLD operators,
and hundreds of ISP's and re-sellers who purchase and re-sell domain name
registration services.  Many of these are profitable and many are quite
large, so their reason for not donating anything to the DNSO has never been
clear.

Possibly the reason donations were not received is not so much a result of
organizations not being willing or able to make them but rather a result of
the fact that the NC itself never promoted this offer.  It is our opinion
that it is critical to create and implement processes and procedures to
facilitate the NC's consensus management role in an objective manner.  So it
seems unfortunate that the NC has never taken any meaningful action to
establish objective, community-wide consensus management processes.

After trying to help the DNSO through community donations for almost two
years, the time has come to recognize that this approach did not work.

Please forward this communication to the Names Council.

Respectfully,

Chuck Gomes
Vice President, Policy & Compliance
VeriSign Global Registry Services