[registrars] Dues of $750 with "forgiveness" for those who choose to pay $250.

[Nicrelations]

Personally I disagree with Richard Lau´s position that "we did all the work, so we should be the only ones endorsing our proposals". The way I see it, if a proposal is good, then I am happy to see it supported also outside of the constituency´s core.

I honestly do not have a problem with raising the fee to USD 750, if this way the work of the constituency can be made more effective (I do however share the position that we as registrars already contribute quite substantially to the ICANN Budget, so really it would be nice of them to provide for the extra staff we need).
On the other side, I would like to see more details on how do we plan to increase participation from those registrars that currently stay outside of the constituency, either because "they cannot afford it" or because they are not very involved in the whole ICANN process, as I believe that is the real issue here.

I think that one of our top priorities at this point should be to try to explain to as many accredited registrars as possible the advantages of participating in the works of the constituency, to be there and affect the policy-making process, because after all they are going to be affected by it even if they did not vote for it. In the end we all gain from extended participation also in terms of legitimacy of our decisions and proposals, which would no longer be the opinion of 50 out of 900 accredited registrars (even though volume-wise we might represent 90% of the registered gTLDs out there), but of the whole registrar corp.

In particular I would like to see an effort in reaching out also to those relatively smaller accredited registrars based outside of North America and Western Europe, and which I think should be incentivated in participating to the works of the constituency, by means of lower membership fees (tiered, if you want) and even grants to participate to the ICANN meetings, if needed.


On another level, is there a reason why emails in this discussion are posted both to the Registrar Constituency ml and to the RC voting one? Any chance we can pick just one, so we all avoid loads of duplicate messages?

Thanks

Best Regards
Francesco Cetraro
Ascio Technologies inc.