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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."
The internet will be shut down until further notice.
Unknown host pong.
From the article: "ICANN is relying on the fact that Europe's Internet registries (although CENTR, despite its name, represents far more than just European interests) will want to have ICANN in charge more than they will want an international body controlled by governments (the ITU)"
I'm not getting something. Why would a (I presume) for-profit corporation like ICANN be preferable to a system controlled by governments? Honest question, I'm really curious. What does ICANN offer that this ITU doesn't?
Yup...
I wonder how much of this has gone to lawyers who are defending them from the idiots over at Verisign?
Considering they only need $1 million to do their core duties, I'd be asking for a fairly detailed itemized bill before I fork over twice as much as last year with no increase in operating costs.
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
as long as Christmas Island coughs up its share of the bill
Peace
Hey, evil isn't cheap.
Two points here. 1. It appears given this letter/slapdown that ICANN now stands for ICANT-because-of-no-money
2. "The Register" has forgotten its political correctness by referring to this problem as a "Mexican stand-off". Wow, the Mexican ambassador is going to be flaming them something fierce :P
Harpo Tunnel Syndrome--my wrist feels funny.
True, $16 million dollars is nothing. So instead of calling people (in this case Europa) cheapskates you should look for other motives. This isn't about money, but control. CENTR obviously doesn't like what ICANN has become, and uses it's most effective way of pressuring ICANN to change.
- These characters were randomly selected.
$16 million is plenty of money. I agree that it very comfortably falls into any "margin of waste" for governments, but it's hardly nothing. For instance, it's roughly the budget shortfall of my old school district that I went to high school in. If I was The World Community and had to decide between a specific appropriation so a bunch of bureaucrats could fly around on private corporate jets at public expense and funding the education of a few thousand children, I'd cut ICANN loose too.
ICANN doesn't run the DNS servers -- it's just reponsible for policy, assigning numbers and address ranges to avoid conflict, etc.
I would guess that the costs go to pay for engineers who know what they're talking about.
Of course, the ICANN meeting locations look like the typical VP-wants-to-tour-the-world-on-the-company-dollar deal.
However, in general, while ICANN isn't perfect, I'd have to say that they're a lot more The Good Guys than, say, certain other folks...and their entire yearly budget is probably less than what certain other folks (*cough* Verisign) pick up through misleading or netabuse-encouraging sales in a week.
May we never see th
Without us Sumerians, you wouldn't have writing! You hereby owe us 699.99 dinars per character ... no, wait, wrong joke ... umm... Soviet Russia ... no ... tinfoil hat ... forget it.
Human being (n.): A genetically human, genetically distinct, functioning organism.
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.
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They're all like that. The last four were in Rio, Montreal, Carthage, and Rome.
"Europe sticks up two fingers at ICANN budget", while over here in the States, we can do the same job with only one.
Give the job back to Jon Postel.
Improve efficiency immeasurably.