ICANN traded the community interest for some guaranteed money from
VeriSign. It was a very simple trade in many ways, which allowed ICANN to bulk up to an annual $50 million budget.
This is cleverly sliced up to appear to be diversified, but is upon
closer examination really a lot of staff costs hidden under such
categories as "Excellence in Policy Development"? ($2.97M); "Excellence
in Operations"? ($15M) and so on.
Overall, ICANN now spends 37% of its $50M on personnel (=staff); 19% on
"professional services"? (=outsourced staff); 13% on "administration and
contingency"? (=staff); 9% on ICANN meetings (mostly staff travel and
lodging costs); and 7% on travel and other meetings (more staff travel
costs). Of the paltry $1.59M spent on capital projects,
$650K went to the L Root Server, $54K went to IANA for DNSSEC, while
the much of the rest is for staff-related costs such as a new telephone
system and new office furniture. This from an organization which is
supposed to assure the smooth technical functioning of the Internet.
The charitable view of this Constantinian bargain is that because
ICANN is now simply too big to abolish, Internet users everywhere
should rejoice that VeriSign and other big companies and governments
will never have unfettered sway. But the corrosive effects of the deal
with VeriSign are still eating through the organization: in addition to
the redistribution of wealth from Internet users to VeriSign, the .com
contract once and for all got rid of the now-dated notion that ICANN
consisted of its membership, and not its leaders and the ICANN staff.
Today, I am not aware of a single person who is not being paid by ICANN
who says "we"? instead of "they"? when referring to ICANN.
Source:
CircleID
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