Re: [Membership] Re: Individual Memberships

[Michael Sondow <msondow@iciiu.org>]

Dr Nii Quaynor a écrit:

> Can we realistically have an ICANN without corporate sponsorship? 

The answer to that is obviously "yes". Many non-profit organizations
exist without corporate sponsorship. Dues from members and funding
from non-profit funding agencies are, I believe, the usual methods
for paying the expenses of non-profit agencies.

> Why is corporate sponsorship considered harmful in this case? 

Isn't this question a little naive? The evident answer is: because
the corporations sponsoring it would have undue influence over it,
to the detriment of those that weren't or couldn't. This would
create an extremly conservative environment for the Internet 
at this time, since it would entrench existing successful
Internet companies and leave new initiatives helpless to survive.

The guidelines for registrars are a good example of this: while
determining the minimum requirements for new registrars, they
deprive the small existing ones of the right to exist. Only the
already big and wealthy can enter. Imagine where the Internet would
be today if ten years ago an international law had been passed that
all Internet software companies had to have a capitalization of a
hundred thousand dollars. The web would not exist.

> How can the perceived
> dangers of corporate sponsorship be contained?

Easy: no direct corporate sponsorship. If ICANN can't be adequately
funded by grants from non-profit funding agencies, then by dues from
members in the form of a small progressive tax on domain name
holders, structured according to their use of basic services like
the web and e-mail, and a similar small structured tax on bandwidth
usage. The key words here being "small" and "structured". Anything
else is synonymous with capture.