[governance] 2013 outlook from RIPE

[David Conrad]

Louis,

On Feb 21, 2013, at 10:48 AM, Louis Pouzin (well) <pouzin at well.com> wrote:
> Who pays for root service ? Taxpayers in all countries.

Not really.

> Since most rootops are government funded institutions.

No they are not.  Of the root server operators, only D (UMD), E (NASA), G and H (US DoD) are run by government funded institutions. Other root server operators probably receive money from government entities for services unrelated to root service (e.g., I suspect state and federal governmental entities buy Internet service from Cogent, WIDE and USC-ISI receive research grants from the Japanese and US governments respectively for all sorts of things, ISC has received government grants for software development, etc), but that is a bit different.

> Who makes money out of root service ?

It's infrastructure.  Who makes money out of the existence of roads?

> Mostly ICANN, and Verisign, inter alia. And no tax.

As far as I am aware, root service is a cost center for all of the root server operators (I believe one or two rootops charge for at least some of the instances of their root servers, but I do not believe any make a profit directly from root service).  It can be argued that ICANN and Verisign make money out of the DNS and thus, indirectly, through root service, but saying Cogent, ISC, Netnod, RIPE-NCC, WIDE, NASA, DoD, UMD and USC-ISI make money out of root service is specious at best.

But I'm sure you already know this.

Regards,
-drc


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