IP: ICANN opening meetings, deferring fees

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

> ICANN opening meetings, deferring fees
> Lisa M. Bowman, ZDNet
>
> Under growing pressure from critics as diverse as Ralph Nader and conservative
> Republican Congressmen, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
> Numbers, or ICANN, is opening its meetings and deferring fees for registrars.
>
> But ICANN board members don't seem too happy about it.
>
> The fledgling organization has come under fire for holding closed sessions and
> charging a $1-per-name fee as it attempts to hash out a plan for registering
> domain names. Now it's stopping those practices, at least for the time being.
>
> In a cautious letter to the Commerce Dept., ICANN Interim Chairman Esther Dyson
> ran down a few of the upcoming policy changes.
>
> Dyson said the board would open its August meeting in Santiago, Chile, even
> though several members oppose that plan.
>
> "Many of its members feel that losing the ability to discuss matters in
> decisional meetings in private will adversely affect the candor of those
> discussions, and potentially the ability to come to working consensus quickly,
> especially on some of the very complicated issues that remain for this board to
> deal with," said Dyson, who supports open meetings.
>
> Controversial $1 fee
> One of the complicated issues for ICANN has been fundraising. The board
> instated a controversial $1 per-domain-name fee, to be paid by the companies
> that plan to register domain names. Dyson said the board would quit collecting
> the fee and refer the issue to a task force. But she warned that the board was
> going broke.
>
> "If ICANN is to continue, it is simply not possible to abandon the
> cost-recovery mechanism that has been produced by the consensus-development
> process and replace it with nothing," she wrote. The task force has a deadline
> of Oct. 1.
>
> She also indicated that ICANN would speed up the process of electing a
> permanent board, putting industry representatives in place by November and then
> working to develop a process to elect at-large members.
>
> The news comes as ICANN foes and fans prepare to testify before a subcommittee
> of the House Judiciary Committee Thursday during a session titled "Is ICANN out
> of control?" It's the first of several hearings regarding ICANN on Capitol
> Hill.
>
>
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