Bret Fausett wrote:
Yet for some reason, ICANN management won't agree to fully fund the travel expenses of ICANN volunteers. Gosh, they might have to spend another $175,000 if they fully funded the GNSO Councilors.
I think ICANN is way too large...in just about everything: budget, size of staff, mission and ambition. I would rather see us start to scale ICANN back than use the bloat as justification for funding everything that is currently unfunded.
I agree. I have particular concern for the reasons expressed in my part of the ALAC review report - that there is no mechanism through which ICANN may be held accountable by the community of internet users for whose benefit ICANN was created and for which it receives immunity from taxation and other privileges. Recently, in conjunction with the conflicker worm we have learned that ICANN has decided to expand into new territory and become an internet police officer, enforcing its own notion of what should be done to shut down an internet virus. What, exactly, ICANN is doing is unknown. And there is no sign that this was done in accord with any known ICANN policy or under what constraints, if any. ICANN, through its imposition of arbitrary and unsubstantiated registry fees on name registrations is taxing the internet community at a rate that is probably on the order of a billion US dollars ($1,000,000,000 USD) every year. ICANN carries the power of life and death over registry businesses that are completely lawful - a power that has been exercised mainly on the "death" side of the balance and often as an apparent protection of ICANN's incumbent registries and intellectual property "stakeholders". The other week I was looking at some elephant seals on a nearby beach - enormous creatures - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOATFGBS7G0 - They remind me of ICANN. ICANN's board, because of the nominating committee process and dilution by "liasons", is composed of worthies who seem more interested in being Mr. Nice Guy than advocates for an accountable, responsible, streamlined ICANN. I was amazed at ICANN's form 990 - it took 136 pages of self congratulatory (and probably rather expensive to create) fluff to convey what should have been said in a 5 page form. Indeed, it is not clear that there actually is the content required of a form 990 inside that huge thing that ICANN published. ICANN has sprouted excrescences, such as its vacuous "Ombudsman", that are expensive and useless and that should be cut away. If we count up all the money that ICANN pulls from the pockets of internet users - the registry fees, the ICANN per-domain tax, etc, we find that we are cumulatively paying more than a billion dollars a year for ICANN. (Most of that billion goes to registries, only a $100,000,000 or so sticks, tax free, to ICANN itself.) And in my opinion we are not getting anything near our money's worth. ICANN needs to be placed on a severe diet. But I do not see any force within ICANN that has the guts to do it. --karl--