The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has agreed to hold its next board meeting in public and to defer collection of the controversial $1 fee it intended to levy for each domain name registered. Esther Dyson, interim chair of ICANN said as much in a letter to Becky Burr, the associate administrator at the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The NTIA’s letter was sent to Tom Bliley, the chair of the House Commerce Committee, which later this week will hold hearings into the practices of ICANN (07/12/99).
However, with the agreement to suspend the collection of the fee, which was to be ICANN’s main source of funding going forward, the non-profit organization also asked the US government for funding to get it through the next few months, as it claims to be dangerously low on funds. Until now ICANN has relied in donations from companies and individuals, but as Dyson says, that’s no way to run an organization such as ICANN. The next ICANN board meeting will be held in Santiago, Chile on August 26 and the decision whether or not to hold the following meeting, scheduled for Los Angeles on November 4 will be left to the board. By then the board will have swollen to 19 members from its current 10, as the three supporting organizations will have their three nominated members each in place by then.
Regarding the funding issue, ICANN intends to establish a task force comprising the name registries address registries and registrars and work out an alternative. It will be asked to report by October 1, after which a public comment period will follow and a decisions made at the November meeting.
