ICANN Budget Questioned

Thing I am writes "The proposed 2004-5 budget for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has hit a snag - the rest of the world is refusing to pay its share of the bill. ICANN last week proposed a budget of $15.8m for next year, nearly twice as much as its current annual expenditure."

Comments

ICANN....

[su2ge]

Not Budget. Someone needs to cut back on using jets and charging it to the organizations account.

Re:ICANN....

[Cramer]

I read their "budget"... accordingly, they are paying an average of $93k per employee. That's insane. And seeing as that's an average, I'd bet 70% of that line item is in the executives pockets. Nothing ICANN is supposed to do is worth that kind of cash. (I'll never understand the need to give CEO's 250k$ + millions in extras. They don't do shit to deserve it.)

As for IANA... what the f*** do they need with 5.8mil? They really don't do hardly anything. They don't host root name servers or run any part of the internet infrastructure. (if IANA went poof tomorrow, the internet wouldn't even notice. they provide valuable services, just not active, critical services.) They deligate address space, assign ASN's, and maintain the associated database(s) for those deligations (and bill for them.) I've built and maintained the same thing for ISPs -- it's not that f'ing difficult. Seeing how they bill for most of what they do, why would they need so much from ICANN?

$15 million

[Ianoo]

I wonder how much of this has gone to lawyers who are defending them from the idiots over at Verisign?

Re:$15 million

[Dachannien]

"We also question the appropriateness of ICANN operating any Root Servers directly.... There are many in the community more suitably qualified to run the Root Servers than ICANN...."

Makes you wonder whether CENTR is getting kickbacks from Verisign.

Open source?

[midifarm]

Does it really cost that much to run a bunch of DNS servers? Couldn't we have some sort of open source type community based DNS service for the world?

Peace

Re:Question about ICANN's place in the world

[takasuz]

An international organization controlled by goverments tends to work bureaucratically and inefficiently. A commercial company can be more flexible and efficient if it is not in monopoly. I think we somehow needs a competition here.

Re:Due to lack of funding...

[Zeinfeld]

I dont know about your claim to have invented the Internet (Is that you, Al??), but i have to say, as a American, without the US the internet would not exist today, so we have a right to own and control some part of it.You guys should be more grateful, for this and other things.

And we Brits invented electricity, the steam engine, television and radio. So we should have the right to control them.

Your claims are actually way off. The Internet protocols were developed in the US, but if the Web had appeared later than it did it would probably have used the OSI stack which was largely the result of work in the UK.

Sure there are technical differences between TCP/IP and OSI, TCP/IP might even have some advantages. But to claim that there would be no computer networking without the US is simply untrue.

Most coutries grow out of this type of weenie size measurement. We grew out of it, you should try it too. Your type of thinking is the reason you guys are currently up to your ass in the Iraq quagmire, that and the fact that your incompetent "President" got taken by a ride by Iranian intelligence. If you were not such suckers for the weenie size rhetoric you would never have elected him in the first place. But then again of course you never did.

What if ICANN vanished?

[Zeinfeld]

Personally, I don't really want to see the Internet become an issue that gets rolled into trade negotiations. The Europeans don't want to see ICANN folded into under the wings of the ITU. But they are fed up with the ways things are being run at ICANN, and holding up funding is just a temporary tactic designed to try and bring about some change at ICANN.

Why not the UN? Do you have a major problem with the way that telephone numbers or satelite orbitals are allocated?

The UN already decides whether a 'country' TLD should be created. The RFC deliberately ceedes that decision to the ISO country code committee. That is how Palestine has a country code.

Very little would change if ICANN disappeared entirely. The IANA function is the sort of thing that could and should have been done using a database with a web interface. There really is not that much to assigning code points. OSI and Web services both have much better schemes (OIDs, URIs).

The country codes would be managed in pretty much the same way as they are today by the same people. There would be no new non country TLDs but none of the new ones have been remotely successful. The holdup on services like the domain name waitlist would end but that will happen anyway.

About all that would change is that the ICANN staff would not get paid and the farce of the ICANN conferences in obscure parts of the world would end.

About the only thing that would change is that as an international treaty organization the ITU could not be sued.

ICANN does actually have a point about the root servers. Only four of them survived the DDoS attack. Of the nine that went under some were pretty respectable. Others are worse than useless. The Internet depends on these servers, there is no excuse not to operate them at telco level reliability.

The ITU is going to absorb ICANN in the end. It is just a matter of time.

Re:Better off

[Khaed]

Yeah, there's nothing wrong with the UN. (Linked story: UN troops buy sex from teenage refugees in Congo camp.)