By Nick Patience
The fundraising effort on behalf of the Internet Corporation for Assigned names and Numbers (ICANN) has now gathered pledges totaling $400,000, according to officials from the Global Internet Project (GIP) yesterday. The GIP is a group of senior executives from companies interested in the development of the internet that launched a pledge drive for the non-profit body back in November, limiting contributions to one per company with a ceiling of $25,000 and a target of $500,000.
However the GIP effort is only part of the ICANN fundraising work going on right now. ICANN president Mike Roberts told us in February that the body would need a total of about $1.1m to get it through to June this year. Earlier in February, Vint Cerf, the co-inventor of TCP/IP and internet guru and GIP member started another pledge drive within the community looking for $1m-$2m. ICANN is due to set a budget when its board meets in Berlin at the end of May, which should make the financial side of ICANN’s operation a lot clearer.
GIP and IBM executive Mike Nelson said yesterday that not all the $400,000 has actually been paid in by the pledges yet. He now says there is a ceiling of $50,000 per company – MCI Worldcom Inc and its subsidiary UUNet technologies Inc have already pledged $25,000 apiece, which made a nonsense of the earlier $25,000 ceiling claim. The ceiling is an attempt to avoiding capture by any one organization and an indication to those companies that do contribute that it will not buy them influence over ICANN’s policy direction. GIP members met with ICANN chairman Esther Dyson on Monday and discussed pans to raise money from other entities outside ICANN, but didn’t give details.
The group also met with three members of the World Bank to discuss ways of increasing funds to less-developed counties to encourage the spread of the net. The GIP also announced a workshop in September in Brussels to examine the progress of Next Generation Internet (NGI) efforts. The GIP had been expected to announce the findings of a report in the internet in Asia, but the group said it wanted to beef up the report a little and do a little bit more analysis before launching it. However, it did says that it is quite bullish on Asia.
The GIP reiterated its opposition to privacy legislation but said that laws would probably needed in the area of internet taxation, which is a fairly non-controversial statement. It will be actively promoting the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) as a privacy tool once it has been through the mill at the W3C and is working on a paper with MIT on personal data privacy. The GIP intends to remodel its web site to become an internet policy portal. Australian telco Telstra Ltd and Deustche Bank are the GIP two newest recruits. http://www.gip.org
