By Nick Patience
The interim board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has decided for a second time to put off making a decision on whether to have a constituency representing individuals to go alongside the ones representing companies, trademarks interests, ISPs and so on. The board decided yesterday to defer making a decision on the matter until its next public meeting in November, having decided back in May to defer the decision until the meeting happening this week in Santiago, Chile.
ICANN has recognized six constituencies that make up the domain name supporting organization (DNSO) that advises the ICANN board on domain name issues. They represent registrars, ISPs, generic top level domain (gTLD) name registries, country code TLD name registries, commercial interests, trademark holders and non- commercial domain name holders (NCDNH).
The reasons for the procrastination is either that the board does not see either the need for such a constituency, given that the board will eventually comprise members elected by an at large membership, or because it thinks the organization trying to form the individuals’ constituency is not representative of the internet community. Joop Teernstra, the founder of the individual domain name owners’ (IDNO) group, which is leading the push for such a constituency asked the board yesterday to explain why they do not feel the IDNO is representative of individual domain name owners. Teernstra says the only requirement for joining the current IDNO movement is a domain name and that the owner of that name is not an organization of any kind.
ICANN board member Hans Kraaijenbrink said the reason for not discussing it at this time was judicial and the matter should be left to the DNSO itself. Dyson said it would be better to concentrate efforts on building the at large membership of ICANN. Board members Frank Fitzsimmons and Greg Crew concurred with Dyson that efforts would be best expended elsewhere and president Mike Roberts said he would be comfortable to see it come back to us in November. ICANN’s next public meeting will be in Los Angeles in early November.
Meanwhile, the creation of an at large membership took up a lot of the meeting’s time yesterday afternoon. Board members have said numerous times that the main reason such a membership has not been created yet is due to the cost of implementing one. Issues such as outreach, user authentication and other anti-fraud measures all cost money. Some at the meeting made what appeared to be constructive suggestions for reaching out to domain name owners, the most obvious of which is using the lists of all the people that have registered names and contacting them.
And on the issue of money, a glance at the cash flow projections for July and August show just how expensive lawyers and other services can be. With the $825,000 in loans that ICANN recently secured, plus some donations, it recently paid around $800,000 in invoices from the previous fiscal and $250,000 from the current year, leaving it with just $37,000 cash at the end of this month. It is known that of the $800,000 ICANN owed, around $500,000 of that was to its outside counsel, Jones, Day Reavis & Pogue. ICANN still has unpaid invoices and bills totaling around $250,000 generated in July and August alone.
