By Nick Patience
3Com Corp is the latest company to loan money to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), providing $175,000 in the form of a one-year unsecured loan. That brings the total raised in the past few days to $825,000 with donations from Cisco Systems Inc and MCI Worldcom Inc; still a fair way short of ICANN’s target of $2m in loans. However the organization is known to be talking to additional companies with a view to securing more loans.
ICANN interim president Mike Roberts, reporting to the domain name supporting organization gathering on the first day of the latest round of ICANN meetings yesterday, said that the $800,000 deficit at the end of the June was due to start-up expenses that were $200,000 above their target, and about $600,000 less than expected in donations from the private sector. To put the financial situation in another perspective, Roberts said before Congress in July that about $500,000 of the $800,000 was money owed to the outside counsel, Joe Sims.
Tomorrow, Thursday sees the first ICANN board meeting that is open to the public, both physically in Santiago, Chile and over the web. However, since ICANN made the decision to open this week’s meeting, it has held two closed meetings by phone at which it has made some crucial decisions, including the authorization to seek the loans.
Money is also the main reason ICANN cites for it not having a membership in place yet. Roberts told the meeting yesterday that ICANN staff has estimated the cost of implementing an ‘at large’ membership with a target of at least 5,000 members at anywhere between $100,000 and $1m.
