[council] DNSO Matching Funds Withdrawn

["Ken Stubbs" <kstubbs@digitel.net>]

FYI

> ----- 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 some regret, that the offer is hereby withdrawn.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
>
>