In an announcement just issued by ICANN (pdf) they are calling for volunteers to “assist in the evaluation of those organizations seeking financial support to apply for a new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD).”
Hum
ICANN has budgeted some $100 Million dollars from incoming application fees from the new gTLD program and they are asking people to volunteer their time to evaluate applicants seeking financial support.
Throughout the new gTLD process and various Guidebooks and meetings ICANN has stated that financial assistance would be made available to certain worthy organization that didn’t have the $185K application fee. This discounted rate if you will was part and parcel of the program.
To now ask people to determine which organization are entitled to financial assistance and a discounted application fee, for free, well it doesn’t seem right to me.
Seems like its a job ICANN should be paying for, not getting it for free.
Here is the announcement
“”The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is seeking volunteers who will assist in the evaluation of those organizations seeking financial support to apply for a new generic Top-Level Domain (gTLD).
“These volunteers will be key to ICANN’s effort to assure that the less-developed parts of the world are able to participate in the new Domain name program,” said Kurt Pritz, Senior Vice President. “The panel members will make a real impact in ensuring that the opportunities for innovation and economic development created by the Internet are open to everyone.”
The volunteers will be chosen for their background and experience in areas such as running a small business, operating in developing economies, analyzing business plans, serving in the public interest, managing a domain name registry service, or awarding grants.
The financial assistance component of the Applicant Support Program offers a limited number of qualifying applicants the opportunity to pay a reduced evaluation fee of $47,000 instead of the full evaluation fee of $185,000.
The selected volunteers will assist in the evaluation of financial support applicants in the context of established public interest, financial capabilities and financial need criteria as outlined in the “Financial Assistance Handbook.”
friggin hilarious.
Do they at least get to plug thier business on icann’s website
Words fail me.
Some of you large portfolio holders should do the math, punch the icann fee x the number of domains you own, and does that equal anything close to the service that is provided by these YAHOOS.
ICANN should be turned over to people who control the space, time for people who actually care about this industry to take control.
If we didn’t learn anything in the market crash of 08, then so be it, icann is milking us all dry, and for what?
The sad thing is, they will probably get volunteers!
ICANN have made a few unpopular moves, in the
last few years, and I say that the new .anything
money-making plan will be a dismal failure.
The majority of large US businesses have already
indicated their displeasure at the new scheme, and
this may be the first time that ICANN get a good
kicking, from a legal perspective…
Long overdue, some will say!…
Gotta wonder how many volunteers they will get, who are quallified and will do this for free.
What’s even worse is that the whole financial support (reduced appication fee) concept was a $2 million sop thrown to the GAC to cool off some of their objections to the new gTLD program.
That $2 million comes from registrants, since they are the source of more than 90% of ICANN’s funding. ICANN is now in the income transfer business, taking funds from domain registrants and shifting them to would-be registry operators who can’t afford a full application fee. That seems like a governmental function, not something appropriate for the supposed technical coordinator of the DNS. If worthy applicants need financial support shouldn’t that be coming from somwhere like the Gates Foundation?
Besides, as we all know the application fee is just a small part of total new TLD startup costs. If an applicant can’t scrape together $185k for ICANN then how are they going to pay the various parties needed to put together an application, much less run a successful registry, pay for back end technical services, and insure that any fail-over will be orderly?
So I’ll volunteer this opinion — any organization that needs an application fee subsidy has no business running a registry. Period.
Phil
I will say I have talked to a LOT of people going to TLD and not all of them want to do it to make money
Some companies are under funded and want to control a TLD lets call it for the greater good then to use it as a for profit vehicle.
Having said that, ICANN committed as part of this new gTLD process to allow some applicants for whatever reason to make application for a discounted amount.
ICANN can afford and should pay for any services related to the new gTLD process.
I’ve always thought the NFL had a lot of nerve asking for (and getting) thousands of volunteers to help them stage events like the Super Bowl while charging networks the kind of money that allows them to charge advertisers $4M a pop for a 30 second ad.
I’m a big a capitalist as they come but everything has a limit
Its goes against my grain to ask people to volunteer their time and efforts to help you make 100’s of millions of dollars.
Occupy ICANN
Everyone dogs ICANN as being one of the most poorly run companies out there, but you know what, on paper the place has got a lot of cash, and a huge budget, and always a surplus. Better than most companies. We may not like then but they sure run a Business. Derma ridivulous but wait till they have all there Fred volumteera and still have there 100M in the bank.
Jp, that’s because they are selling something that costs nothing to produce and pennies to maintain: a “domainname”. Of course they are going to do well. SRI proved that before NSI (Verisign), and later NewCo (ICANN) took over.
Some people look and ICANN and wonder: This is a monopoly. Why can’t we stop them?
Because they are not a monopoly. NSI was a monopoly. At that time, there was no choice. And the Justice Department did take action on the matter. So NSI passed the ball to NewCo/ICANN.
ICANN is not a monopoly. Anyone can change their default DNS settings (assuming Apple hasn’t locked them down on their iPads and iPhones) and instantaneously free themselves from the ICANN “monopoly”.
Right now your DNS settings point at some servers somewhere, e.g. your ISP, that use ICANN’s root, exclusively. It’s just a convention. Nothing more. Old habits die hard.
But you could just as easily have your settings point to some server that doesn’t use ICANN’s root exclusively. The server might even be on your own computer. This is in fact an excellent way to protect yourself from internet crime, since most of it relies on DNS and the fact users do not take an active role in deciding what addresses they permit their computers to connect to.
Domainnames cost nothing to create. Anyone can create them. You can assign any name you want to any IP number you want. Your OS will know what to do. And http server software can be configured to accept any number of “domainnames”. No one is going to sue you for trademark infringement if you configure your web server to accept a domainname that is a trademark.
It’s the IP number that is important.
Names are a convenient way to avoid typing numbers, and we might even consider this a “service”, but truthfully anyone can run that service for themselves.
It costs nothing. And it’s far safer than what people are using today (ICANN-approved registries, ISP caches, DNS service providers and so forth).
But consumers don’t know this. And those who charge people for these “services”, e.g. as part of the ICANN system, do quite well based on that ignorance.
@dumb
Oh yea I’m fully aware of all that and how the system works, and it’s history.
Too bad the only way we have to buy stock in ICANN is via domain names. Better if real stock.
I also think we’ll see a “successful” alternate root in our time as well. By successful I mean sustaining.
Jp, right on. Hey, you could always volunteer for ICANN. Maybe you can get to know some people and work your way into their crusty old domainname racket. 😉
Or you could apply your knowledge towards something new and different, like that self-sustaning alternate root, or something else even better.
Great News , ICANN Get volunteers How Many is that and , i want to know all thing what quality needed for that…
I am interested to work as volunteers.
@Mike –By no means was I saying that every TLD applicant should be a profit-making venture, in fact I would hope that many applications are filed by non-profits with objectives that do not include maximizing profit (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
What I was saying is that the application fee is just a small part of the total cost of getting a new registry up and running, and if you can’t swing that it raises questons about the applicant’s long-term vialbility.
What I was also saying is that this subsidy starts ICANN down a slippery slope where they solve internal problems with the GAC by throwing $ at them — and the $ is from registrants. Income transfer/subsidization is something that governments do, and whatever one thinks of that at least most governments these days must get some consent from the governed. But when ICANN starts acting as a taxing authority and shifting resources from one group to another those who are taxed (registrants) have no real say in that decision — as anyone who watched the way in which this subsidy idea was broached to the GAC and accepted will attest. ICANN already has no incentive to care about registry pricing decisions, because price increases flow through to it to support an ever-expanding bureaucratuc infrastructure. Now, on top of that, we can expect more requests for subsidies (like, for example, when some of these subsidized applicants face shutdown of their registries and the GAC requests continuing financial support so that their worthy but financially challenged efforts can continue).
That’s why I think that subsidies like this should properly come from private foundations, not from ICANN.
ICANN is largely volunteer driven in general, so this isn’t particularly surprising.
If I recall correctly, getting volunteers to do this was a recommendation of the JAS working group, itself made up of volunteers.
Kevin
A lot of the volunteers work on policy development and policy issues.
This new gTLD program is a money making venture, no an esoteric or academic exercise.
ICANN is taking in big bucks to administer the program and the program was sold to the GAC in part on worthy organizations getting discounts off the application fee.
Sorry with $100M +++ coming in from the program no one needs to work for free on the program
I think ICANN would dispute that it’s a money-making venture (for ICANN). It’s budgeted as revenue-neutral, remember. Any excess is probably going to be used to support disadvantaged applicants in future rounds.
The budget may well be BS, of course, but that’s a different argument.
and since you mention it the budget does not contain $1 of income coming in from the auction of strings having more than one application
Of course the cost of vetting the applications to determine who should be entitled to a discount since it was part of the overall plan should have been accounted for in the budget.
It would be like calling for volunteers to do the criminal background check which is also part of the program.
If ICANN forgot to account for this cost they need to eat it, not ask people to do there work for free.