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The Almighty Buck The Internet

ICANN Budget Questioned 126

Posted by CowboyNeal from the we're-not-gonna-pay-it dept.
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."
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ICANN Budget Questioned More

ICANN Budget Questioned

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  • The internet will be shut down until further notice.

    • Re:Due to lack of funding... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Zeinfeld ( 263942 ) on Saturday May 29, 2004 @09:17AM (#9284559) Homepage
      The only significant new cost in ICANN's budget is littigation.

      There would be no real problem with ICANN if there was a rational process for appointing it. The problem here is that a constitution designed for a benevolent dictator is now in the hands of a group of people with the outlook of a US CEO.

      This is the sort of thing that happened at the New York Stock Exchange.

      • Re:Due to lack of funding... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by leerpm ( 570963 ) on Saturday May 29, 2004 @09:45AM (#9284639)
        But in the article it also states they are requesting a lot more money for the IANA. Twenty times more in fact. With the RIRs and LIRs taking over more of the duties with respect to number assignment in IPv6, I don't see why the IANA needs so much more money.

        Somebody at ICANN needs to wise up, and stop trying so many power grabs. They should be delegating as much as possible to the regional/country authorities. Instead they seem to be on a crusade to be the ultimate ruling body on all matters relating to the Internet. And yet, they have shown they barely have the strength to stand up to a company like VeriSign.

        • Re:Due to lack of funding... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Ateryx ( 682778 ) on Saturday May 29, 2004 @10:43AM (#9284805)
          They should be delegating as much as possible to the regional/country authorities.

          While I'm never part of the tinfoil hat crowd, it does make me concerned when the most free form of media becomes more and more in control of one country.

          • While I'm never part of the tinfoil hat crowd, it does make me concerned when the most free form of media becomes more and more in control of one country.

            Part of the problem is that we have become used to any countries at all
            controlling the infrastructure. CENTR is no more trustworthy than
            ICANN or the ITU. The world's governments have recognized that the "internet"
            is an actual space, and they are acting in the way that governments always do
            - by asserting control.

            Frontier is, by definition, ungoverne

        • Being an optimistic, I'm hoping it is capital meant to kick start IPv6 deployment and/or litigation funds for the "you don't shut down spammers, we reassign your netblock" policies that are probably inevitable.

      • The constitution was designed to have frequent elections of the board members...but they've neglected to ever have one. (It's possible that I have the wrong group here, but I doubt it.)

        Personally, I think everyone should refuse to pay ICANNs budget. But I believe that the US govt. has assumed control. In which case, I certainly understand everyone else refusing to pay.

        My personal feeling is that the rest of the world should get together and create their own equivalent. Then the US could join as an equ

  • ICANN.... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by su2ge ( 713552 )
    Not Budget. Someone needs to cut back on using jets and charging it to the organizations account.

    • Re:ICANN.... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Cramer ( 69040 )
      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

  • Question about ICANN's place in the world (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Altima(BoB) ( 602987 ) on Saturday May 29, 2004 @09:12AM (#9284547)
    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?
    • ``What does ICANN offer that this ITU doesn't?''

      They fall under US jurisdiction.
      • I'm puzzled as to why that would be a selling point to Europe's registries.

        • Re:Question about ICANN's place in the world (Score:5, Insightful)

          by leerpm ( 570963 ) on Saturday May 29, 2004 @09:57AM (#9284675)
          Because the ITU falls under the control of the UN. At the UN, both the US and Europe have much less influence and control. By handing 'control of the Internet' over to the UN, the developed nations would run the risk of less developed nations using their new found control as a bargaining chip against the US/Europe in other matters.

          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.

          • What if ICANN vanished? (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Zeinfeld ( 263942 ) on Saturday May 29, 2004 @11:08AM (#9284880) Homepage
            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.

            • I think one of the 1st things the ITU will do is revoke all existing class A address and give notice to all class B holder to reduce their holdings. Then I expect the existing class A address space to be split up by the most complex way any group of people could think of based mostly on population potential relative to existing ip address assignments and existing social boundires or something like that.
          • Because the ITU falls under the control of the UN. At the UN, both the US and Europe have much less influence and control. By handing 'control of the Internet' over to the UN, the developed nations would run the risk of less developed nations using their new found control as a bargaining chip against the US/Europe in other matters.

            I'd like to see a list of the biggest financial backers of the UN. I'd be willing to bet that the lion's share of funding comes from North American and Western Europe. The ITU's
    • 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.
      • I don't think competition is a good idea. The ICANN is an authority, and you can't really have more than one. Imagine that two authorities would incompatibly assign names or numbers *shivers*. To prevent such a situation, you would need an even higher authority...ad nauseam.

        My view is that (although ICANN has been doing an okay job) infrastructure (like the Internet) is too important to entrust to a (for-profit) company. Of course, any organization can mess up, but if it's for profit, you know for sure you
      • Competition in WHAT? The point of IANA is to be the one authoritative source for IPv4 and v6 allocations. You can't have competition in whether an entry is in a database...it either is, or it isn't. Whoever has the authority to allocate IPs is immediately in a monopoly position.

        In fact, for IP allocation, there *must* be a monopoly party keeping track of the central database, because the net was designed with the assumption that IPs would be organizationally unique. If you have two different parties bo
      • I do not see why an authoritative role had to be eternally entrusted to a single company. A govenment is an authority but there always is a possiblity of take-over by another party through a democratic election. That is (at least in theory) what prevents a govenment from corruption and over-spending our tax money.

        In the present case, the work that is to be done is not a product development but mainly administrative tasks. For the administrative tasks you would simply pick a company that could do the be

    • Re:Question about ICANN's place in the world (Score:5, Insightful)

      by fractaloon ( 454371 ) on Saturday May 29, 2004 @09:46AM (#9284643) Homepage
      Why would a (I presume) for-profit corporation like ICANN be preferable to a system controlled by governments?

      Actually, ICANN is a non-profit according to their website [icann.org]. I'm guessing they want to jack up their salaries 20 fold and the easiest way is to try and hold everyone at gunpoint.

    • Re:Question about ICANN's place in the world (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Maxwell'sSilverLART ( 596756 ) on Saturday May 29, 2004 @10:16AM (#9284727) Homepage

      Why would a (I presume) for-profit corporation like ICANN be preferable to a system controlled by governments?

      If you don't like what the corporation is doing, you can stop paying. Try that with government.

    • The humorous part of that is that ICANN *IS* a government body (of the US). It may be officially independent, but only in the sense that an MS funded independent study is.

      Now it USED to be an independent body. It was getting into trouble because it wasn't obeying it's constitution and holding elections. This changed around 1990 or so, when the US govt. recognized it. Since then nobody's said anything about elections. I believe that the standing board voted to modify their constitution so that election

  • $15 million (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Ianoo ( 711633 ) on Saturday May 29, 2004 @09:13AM (#9284550) Journal
    I wonder how much of this has gone to lawyers who are defending them from the idiots over at Verisign?

    • Re:$15 million (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Dachannien ( 617929 )
      "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.

  • Better off (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It's better than what the UN would charge for this (I shudder to think)

    • Re:Better off (Score:1, Insightful)

      by CountBrass ( 590228 )

      The only problem with the UN?: The fact that the world's richest country refuses to pay the money it owes and has treaty obligations to hand-over to fund the UN.

      The reason? As Iraq as shown: The US doesn't honour it's own Constituion (see the election of El Presidente Dublya) nor international treaties: not even the Geneva convention.

      • It's unfortunate that the parent was modded a flamebait as he happens to make a very valid point. The current US administration has not been honoring the international treaties that it is a party to. Glossing over the whole "legality" of Bush's appointment to the office of President, there are the issues of the Geneva convention, the Kyoto Agreement and several others which, if I had the time and the caffeine, I would cite here.

        The fact is, for the past several years, we haven't been playing by the rules.
        • legality? re-read the constitution. it went by the books. he won florida, and thus the majority of the states. and we are following the letter of the geneva convention (if not the spirit, but spirit these days has died thanks to lawyers). and we have not signed on under the geneva convention as of yet, so it does not affect us. anyways, the u.n. is a dead organization. nothing can get done there. too many chiefs and not enough indians. i mean, if they cannot agree that a certain former iraqi leader broke a
      • The only problem with the UN?: The fact that the world's richest country refuses to pay the money it owes and has treaty obligations to hand-over to fund the UN.

        Actually most of the money has already been paid.

        Although folk are moderating this point as flamebait, it is very relevant. There is a lot of complaining in the US about the UN from people who resent any check on US power. The most extreeme version of this being the black helicopter crowd who believe the UN is bent on world domination.

        In prac

      • Re:Better off (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Khaed ( 544779 )
        Yeah, there's nothing wrong with the UN. [independent.co.uk] (Linked story: UN troops buy sex from teenage refugees in Congo camp.)
        • That's not the UN's doing, rather that of the people working for them. Soldiers aren't exactly considered the most decent people, either.
          • Much like U.S. Soldiers running prison camps?

          • What I was replying to:

            The only problem with the UN?: The fact that the world's richest country refuses to pay the money it owes and has treaty obligations to hand-over to fund the UN.

            My point was that the UN doesn't just have "one problem." No group that is made up of people has only _one_ problem. (unless the problem is "that it's made up of flawed _people_.")

            The UN isn't made up of magical perfect beings who are right all the time and would be perfect to take over for ICANN, and the US not paying t

      • Re:Better off (Score:1, Flamebait)

        by BCW2 ( 168187 )
        The US covers HALF the total UN budget. We are willing to reduce that to our "fair share" at any time. Then the rest of you lazy bastards can pick up the slack. Or go away, doesn't matter.
    • ICANN's claim to fame: "We're faster and cheaper than the United Nations!"

  • Good (Score:5, Insightful)

    by UberOogie ( 464002 ) on Saturday May 29, 2004 @09:15AM (#9284554)
    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.

  • The internet will be fine.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Tuvai ( 783607 ) <zeikfried@gmail.com> on Saturday May 29, 2004 @09:21AM (#9284570) Journal
    as long as Christmas Island coughs up its share of the bill

  • Open source? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by midifarm ( 666278 ) on Saturday May 29, 2004 @09:22AM (#9284576) Homepage
    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

    • The article states that CENTR specifically does not want ICANN running the root servers. The budget for ICANN is composed of lots of other administrative costs related to tracking domain name registrations.

      As for a community-based DNS system, its just a bit expensive to run a server that takes that much traffic. Sure, you can cache and mirror stuff all over the place, but the information has to start somewhere, and you can't have the delay between the root and the millions of community DNS nodes get incred
    • Like OpenNIC [unrated.net] then?

    • ICANN doesn't run DNS servers (Score:5, Informative)

      by 0x0d0a ( 568518 ) on Saturday May 29, 2004 @09:51AM (#9284662) Journal
      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 [icann.org] 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.

  • In other news (Score:2, Funny)

    by Sv1ad ( 779056 )
    ....the Internet is auctioned off to the highest bidder. Microsoft goes broke trying to out-bid McDonalds for control of the Internet....

  • Hey (Score:5, Funny)

    by loyalsonofrutgers ( 736778 ) on Saturday May 29, 2004 @09:36AM (#9284610)
    Hey, evil isn't cheap.

  • Wow (Score:3, Insightful)

    by arvindn ( 542080 ) on Saturday May 29, 2004 @09:40AM (#9284624) Homepage Journal
    ...without the rest of the world on side, ICANN is master of nothing but its own backyard. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has already made it clear that it would like to take over, and if ICANN can't get worldwide consensus, the ITU will be in a strong position.

    Could ICANN be committing suicide the way XFree86 did?

  • != that I should.

  • Mexican stand-off??? (Score:4, Funny)

    by malia8888 ( 646496 ) on Saturday May 29, 2004 @09:43AM (#9284634)
    We have a Mexican stand-off and currently ICANN has more to lose. ®

    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

  • ICANN Budget (Score:2, Informative)

    by dncsky1530 ( 711564 )
    ICANN 2004 Budget [icann.org]
    Main Points:
    • "Four years ago as part of the approval of the 1999-2000 budget, the Board stated: "It is the intention of the ICANN Board to create a reserve account of at least one year's operating expenditures, to be funded over several fiscal years." Approval by the Board of the 1999-2000 budget implied that the Board accepted this statement about the appropriate level of reserves."
    • 2002 .com domains: 33,333,000, 2003 .com domains: 31,819,000
  • just some suggestions, there are already organizations that are helping "run" and do policy development in the internet. maybe organizations such as iana, ripe, arin, apnic, aso, can contribute some. or since the internet is a global resource, maybe there can be a change in fees structure that will be charged for domains and ip addresses being used (though being done now.) but a better way maybe is to merge the functions.

    it is quite confusing for me (so someone can clarify here) that there are overlapp

  • ICANN, the destination resort (Score:5, Informative)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Saturday May 29, 2004 @11:09AM (#9284888) Homepage
    ICANN holds meetings as if it were some big-time international organization. It's Esther Dyson's "queen of the Internet" arrogance. They need to downgrade a bit. Here's their July meeting announcement:

    • You'll be guaranteed a tan this summer if you come to ICANN Kuala Lumpur which takes place from 19-23 July.

      Be a part of the meeting and enjoy the beauty and hospitality of Kuala Lumpur where the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), will be your host. The meeting will take place in the award winning Shangri-La Hotel, Kuala Lumpur. Centrally located in KL's Golden Triangle the meeting venue is centrally located to allow guests easy access to the best of Kuala Lumpur's sights and sounds.

      Set against the vibrant backdrop of KL, ICANN Kuala Lumpur will also be an opportunity for you to meet, network and interact with the Malaysian communications and multimedia community and industry.

      So book your berth to ICANN Kuala Lumpur by registering early. ...

      There's always lots to see and do in Kuala Lumpur. KL really is the city that never sleeps. From late night latte to night clubs, from some of the world's best scuba diving spots to tropical jungle getaways and some of Asia's best golf courses, you'll find yourself spoilt for choice.

    They're all like that. The last four were in Rio, Montreal, Carthage, and Rome.

  • Talk about inefficiency.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Dachannien ( 617929 ) on Saturday May 29, 2004 @11:18AM (#9284936)
    "Europe sticks up two fingers at ICANN budget", while over here in the States, we can do the same job with only one.

  • From ICANN to ICAN'T

    -dodges the incoming flames-

    It's early..
  • For those of you that don't know how ICANN operates, here is a transcript [satirewire.com] of one of their meetings. It's really eye opening.

  • I have the solution (Score:4, Funny)

    by blair1q ( 305137 ) on Saturday May 29, 2004 @03:39PM (#9286081) Journal

    Give the job back to Jon Postel.

    Improve efficiency immeasurably.

  • You would think the rulers of the internet would hold their meetings online to show how smart and efficient they are. Netmeeting anyone?
  • Perhaps ICANN should start acquring money on the internet through other means, pr0n seems to be pretty successful to me and seems a logical step. It is after all why the internet is around. Perhaps enforce some sort of pr0n levy?

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