Personally, I think that says it all. My own mutual funds have lost approximately 1/3 of their value since the dump in the stock market. Seems fairly obvious and reasonable. But that's just me.

But ICANN's not supposed to be in the stock market. They have a large contingency fund (way too large by some measures) which the budget estimates would earn $1M on a fund of $25M, which was a plausible 4%, something you could get on the kinds of investments that are reasoanble for such a fund, bank deposits or government bonds. But instead they apparently have an 18% loss. There may be a legitimate explanation, e.g., maybe they hedged all their non-dollar expenses last summer when the A$ was at 95c and the Euro was at $1.54, and now they're marking their hedges down to 64c and $1.29, but an organization that claims to be transparent needs more than a footnote to explain where the $4.6M went. Regards, John Levine, johnl@iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies", Information Superhighwayman wanna-be, http://www.johnlevine.com, ex-Mayor "More Wiener schnitzel, please", said Tom, revealingly.

For what it's worth, I have requested "ICANN financial transparency" to be added to the Agenda of the NARALO General Assembly, to be held during the ICANN At-Large Summit in Mexico City. Those of you who will not be able to attend in person will be able to connect by teleconference. As advance preparation for the meeting I have asked staff to have ready for us as much of a detailed accounting as exists, for the amount and the breakdown of money spent on At-Large over the past two years (just one year would not have been sufficient as the Summit has no doubt ballooned this year's figures). At that point I would like NARALO to examine the documents and determine their level of completeness, and determine any necessary specific action to be taken to increase ICANN's financial transparency. - Evan