You can check my numbers against those in the published ICANN budgets, but I think the table below is more or less accurate:


ICANN is accepting comments on its latest budget at budget-comments@icann.org.

From TheHill.com: "Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti, meanwhile, is also lobbying for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which assigns names and numbers to Internet users."

Tim Wu, guest blogging on Larry Lessig's weblog, writes: "ICANN...is basically like a hobbit." (corrected, see below)

From a reader who wanted to comment on the ICANN Budget. No wonder the comment page is still blank after two weeks. 

--
Date: 24 May 2006 18:17:52 -0000
From: MAILER-DAEMON@yahoo.com
Subject: failure notice
 
Hi. This is the qmail-send program at yahoo.com.

I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.

This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<budget-comments@icann.org>:
192.0.34.36 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550 5.1.1 <budget-comments@icann.org>... User unknown. Giving up on 192.0.34.36.

From the If-You-Could-Do-This-In-Three-Hours, Why-Has-It-Taken-Eight-Years Department: "The public meeting will be held from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. on July 26, 2006."

Updated News From the IGF. Here's an update to my blog post on the IGF agenda immediately below. After meetings in Geneva, the proposed topics have been amended to read as follows:


You can read the entire thread and follow the changes to the draft here.
Earlier and Now Out-Dated: Qusai Al-Shatti, from the Civil Society delegation to the Internet Governance Forum's planning committee, reports from Geneva that the IGF leadership has tabled six major themes for possible inclusion on the inaugural agenda for the IGF in Athens later this year: (a) Cybersecurity and Cybercrimes,u covering issues like Spam; (b) Enabling environment for Intellectual Property Rights and Privacy; (c) Multilingualism, covering Content and IDNs; (d) Transparent and equitable Internet resource management; (e) Affordability and availability covering equal access to information and knowledge; (f) Promotion of open standards, open architecture and open source software.
Almost a week into the public comment phase on ICANN's $31,000,000 Budget and no one has a comment? Does this mean the budget is acceptable to everyone or that everyone understands that the current public comment opportunity wouldn't possibly yield a substantial reduction in the budget?
If you haven't read the .XXX FOIA documents, linked from this post on ICANNWatch, you really ought to do so. They provide a fascinating window into the way the U.S. Department of Commerce, ICANN Staff and the GAC leadership work together behind the scenes.
Speaking of .XXX, here is a really oddly sourced article about the .XXX FOIA lawsuit. The reporter has comments from three California lawyers, at three different large firms, with no comments from ICANN, ICM Registry, or the DOC and no discussion of the actual source documents. Knowing something about the way large law firm marketing departments work, the article makes me think its purpose was to "place quotes" from attorneys at the big firms rather than inform readers.
.Mobi sunrise registrations launched yesterday. Here's the list of .MOBI accredited registrars. General registration opens on August 28th.
Before falling victim to the SEC's Pre-IPO "Quiet Period," Go Daddy's Bob Parsons weighed in on the "domain name tasting" issue: "During the month of April 2006, a little more than 35 million domain names were registered. Of these names, 32.7 million were used – most again and again – but never permanently registered. These 32.7 million names were part of a scheme – a growing abuse of the domain system — one I wrote about in my last blog article. It’s an outrageous practice...."

Instead of "tasting," he calls the practice "kiting."

Scripting News: "If I were going to launch a competitor to FeedBurner, here's how I'd do it. First, I'd either do a deal with a registrar, become a registrar, or merge or partner with one. It's absolutely essential that the user own the domain that their feed is hosted at, so that, in case of emergency, they can switch to a different hosting service. If they don't own the domain, it doesn't matter how many promises the vendor makes, or how well-intentioned they are, an act of god could result in a blackout of a huge portion of the RSS network. It's irresponsible to host a large percentage of the net's RSS feeds at one domain. I would set it up so it's the other way around. My hosting service won't host your feed unless you own the domain....."

That advice doesn't just apply to RSS services, it's a good rule of thumb for e-mail, hosting, blogging....you name it. When you have your own domain name, you avoid a lot of "lock-in" from various service providers.

In the early days of ICANN, ISPs were very open about why they opposed new top-level domains, especially those that might be marketed to end-sers: they were afraid that if everyone had their own domain name, users might actually be able to switch to a new service provider. Without a domain name, one of the switching costs is having to tell everyone in your address book that you have a new address. Add blogging to the mix, and you also have to hope that the search engines catch up to your new address as well.

The Go Daddy Group, Inc. , FORM S-1, REGISTRATION STATEMENT UNDER THE SECURITIES ACT OF 1933.

which means that "Life Online With Bob Parsons", formerly "Radio GoDaddy", and the Bob Parsons weblog are now in a quiet period.....

Here it is: the proposed ICANN Budget for FY2006-2007. The budget is for $30,977,000, up $7,990,000 over the Budgeted FY2005-2006 (and up $12,168,000 over ICANN's actual incurred costs for FY2005-2006).

Now is the time say so. Here's a new post from the U.S. Department of Commerce:


The idea here is that it's ICANN's job to lose. ICANN will get another year of the IANA unless another ready, willing and able entity makes its desire to run the IANA known. Soon....by June 17th!

ADD: I think there's a very short list of entities that could perform the IANA function. ICANN's certainly on the list, but so are three or four other entities. It's a short list, but it's longer than 1.

which hasn't issued a press release in ages...comes word that "Denise Michel has been appointed as Vice President - Policy Development." This is good. Congratulations to Denise!

Holy smokes. This one stunned me:


Make no mistake, the change from "lurker" to "full, open participant in a leadership role" marks one huge turn in ICANN's approach to the U.N. and the I.G.F.

The first podcast in a long time. Blame it on baseball. I talk through the .XXX debacle, review the news and the blog statements from the blogging Directors (Crawford | Markovski). (iPro Radio 75 | 10.4 Megabytes, 18 Minutes). Header Music: "Awake" by Letters to Cleo.

Kieren McCarthy has an MP3 from yesterday's .XXX press conference. Veni Markovski is serving a copy too from his weblog.

Here are two resolutions from June, 2005:

Resolved [05.32] the Board authorizes the President and General Counsel to enter into negotiations relating to proposed commercial and technical terms for the .XXX sponsored top-level domain (sTLD) with the applicant.

Resolved [05.33] if after entering into negotiations with the .XXX sTLD applicant the President and General Counsel are able to negotiate a set of proposed commercial and technical terms for a contractual arrangement, the President shall present such proposed terms to this board, for approval and authorization to enter into an agreement relating to the delegation of the sTLD.

The Board approved these resolutions by a vote of 6-3 with two abstentions. Affirmative votes were cast by Vinton Cerf, Hagen Hultzsch, Joichi Ito, Veni Markovski, Vanda Scartezini, and Paul Twomey. Negative votes were cast by Raimundo Beca, Alejandro Pisanty and Hualin Qian. The following Board Members abstained from voting: Demi Getschko and Michael Palage.

Here is the press release from this week's meeting:

ICANN's Board voted 9 to 5 against the proposed agreement. Votes in favor of the proposed .XXX Registry Agreement were cast by the following Board Members: Veni Markovski, Susan Crawford, Peter Dengate Thrush, Joichi Ito, and Mouhamet Diop. Directors who voted against the approval were Vint Cerf (Chairman), Alejandro Pisanty (Vice-Chairman), Raimundo Beca, Demi Getschko, Hagen Hultzsch, Njeri Rionge, Vanda Scartezini, Paul Twomey (President and CEO), and Hualin Qian. Additional details regarding the vote will be provided by ICANN later this week.

William Hobbs: "For security reasons, the remaining ICANN board members have been locked in a soundproof chamber until July 2008, and could not be reached for comment."

Subject:	ICANN Press Conference
Date:	Thu, 11 May 2006 11:11:39 -0700
From:	Bret Fausett
To:	andrew.robertson@edelman.com

Andrew,

Could you forward to me the call-in information for this afternoon's 
press conference? Many thanks.

     Bret Fausett

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http://icann.blog.us
http://www.internet.pro
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Press releases like this one seem to spring forth every few years. I see some disagreement on the web as to whether the plugin is spyware. F-Secure says it is.