July 27, 1999


                                                 Jun Murai, President
                                     Japan Network Information Center


                Financial support for ICANN (report)


JPNIC donated 25,000 US dollars as
financial assistance to ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names
and Numbers).

ICANN is a nonprofit organization established in the fall of 1998 to
support the stable development of the Internet by globally
coordinating the management of domain names and IP addresses. ICANN,
though registered in the United States, operates without subsidy from
 the U.S. government, according to the policy that
the Internet should be operated through private, bottom-up efforts.


At present, ICANN is initiating active discussion on the democratic
management of Internet resources. ICANN is run by participants
from all over the world, reflecting the global nature of the Internet.
JPNIC sends its Trustee, working group members and secretariat staff
to ICANN. JPNIC endorses ICANN's objective of ensuring the stable
operations of the Internet under private leadership. JPNIC plans to
realize this objective by carrying out various activities in cooperation
with ICANN.

Today ICANN faces financial difficulties because it  has
been financed mostly by the contributions of private volunteers since
its foundation. The U.S. government offered financial assistance to ICANN
to ease its financial difficulties, but ICANN declined according to its policy of private initiative.

JPNIC appreciates this decision by ICANN and decided to financially
assist ICANN in order to sustain private coordination in the
management of Internet resources such as domain names, IP addresses,
protocols and root servers and to ensure continuing stable development of the
Internet . If ICANN ceased to exist, administration of these
resources would become unstable, having a serious influence on the
Internet as a whole.

In view of this situation, JPNIC has given financial
assistance to ICANN to enable it to continue to operate and  develop,
 thus contributing to the stability of the Internet in
the future. We hope that this clarifies the purpose of our aid.

ICANN is inviting contributions to set up the ICANN Startup Fund. The
fund will cover initial operating expenses until a permanent funding
mechanism is decided for ICANN. The ICANN contact details for sending contributions are at:

        http://www.icann.org/startup-fund.html