ICANN launches cash-for-kids scheme

ICANN will hand over cash to help community members cover their childcare commitments, the organization announced yesterday.

If you show up to an ICANN public meeting with an ankle-biter under 12 years of age, ICANN will give you up to $750 to cover the cost of babysitting.

You’ll have to show receipts, and ICANN will not cover stuff like travel, lodging, tourism or other costs that parents would have during the normal course of owning a kid.

Only volunteer community members will qualify, not staffers. The full list of rules can be found here.

While the announcement may seem unusual, it does not come out of the blue. There have been a number of public calls, from a handful of single parents, for ICANN to lay on some kind of on-site childcare services over the last several years.

It isn’t doing that, however. Good grief, imagine the optics if ICANN accidentally killed a kid…

Instead, it will only give parents a list of nearby childcare providers, which it will not formally vet or recommend, and let them make their own minds up.

The program is a pilot, and will run at the next three meetings in Montreal, Cancun and Kuala Lumpur.

Time for some more ICANN salary porn

ICANN has filed its tax return for its fiscal 2018, so it’s once again that time of the year in which the community gets to salivate over how much its top staffers get paid.

The latest form 990, covering the 12 months to June 30, 2018, shows that the top 21 ICANN employees were compensated to the tune of $10.3 million, an average of $492,718 each.

That’s up about 4% from $9.9 million in the previous year, an average across the top 21 staffers of $474,396 apiece.

These numbers include base salary, bonuses, and benefits such as pension contributions.

Employee compensation overall increased from $60 million to $73.1 million.

The biggest earner was of course CEO Göran Marby, who is now earning more than his immediate predecessor Fadi Chehadé but a bit less than last-but-one boss Rod Beckstrom.

Marby’s total compensation was $936,585, having received a bonus of almost $200,000 during the year. His base salary was $673,133.

The number of staffers receiving six-figure salaries increased from 159 in fiscal 2017 to 183 — about 44% of its estimated end-of-year headcount.

Towards the end of the reported year, as ICANN faced a budget crunch, many members of the ICANN community had called on the organization to rein in its spending on staff.

ICANN says it targets compensation in the 50th to 75th percentile range for the relevant industry.

The top five outside contractors in the year were:

• Jones Day, ICANN’s go-to law firm. It received $5.4 million, down from $8.7 million in 2017.
• Zensar Technologies, the IT consultancy that develops and supports ICANN software. It received $3.7 million.
• IIS, the Swedish ccTLD registry, which does pre-delegation testing for new gTLDs. It received $1.3 million.
• Iron Mountain, the data escrow provider. It received $1.1 million.
• Infovity, which provides Oracle software support. It received $1 million.

The return shows that ICANN made a loss of $23.9 million in the year, on revenue that was down from $302.6 million to $136.7 million.

The primary reason for this massive decrease in revenue was the $135 million Verisign paid for the rights to run .web, at an ICANN last-resort auction, in ICANN’s fiscal 2017.

The tax form for 2018 can be found here (pdf) and 2017’s can be found here (pdf).

Four presidents slam .amazon decision

The leaders of four of the eight governments of the Amazon region of South America have formally condemned ICANN’s decision to move ahead with the .amazon gTLD.

In a joint statement over the weekend, the presidents of Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia, said they have agreed to “to join efforts to protect the interests of our countries related to geographical or cultural names and the right to cultural identity of indigenous peoples”.

These four countries comprise the Andean Community, an economic cooperation group covering the nations through which the Andes pass, which has just concluded a summit on a broad range of issues.

The presidents said they have “deep concerns” about ICANN’s decision to proceed towards delegating .amazon to Amazon the company, over the objections of the eight-nation Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization.

ICANN is “setting a serious precedent by prioritizing private commercial interests over public policy considerations of the States, such as the rights of indigenous peoples and the preservation of the Amazon in favor of humanity and against global warming”, they said (via Google Translate).

ACTO had been prepared to agree to Amazon running .amazon, but it wanted effective veto power on the TLD’s policy-setting committee and a number of other concessions that Amazon thought would interfere with its commercial interests.

As it stands, Amazon has offered to block thousands of culturally sensitive domains and to give the ACTO nations a minority voice in its policy-making activities.

ICANN will soon open these proposed commitments to public comment, and will likely decide to put .amazon into the root not too long thereafter.

ICANN plans return to Cancun in 2021

ICANN has named the locations of two of its 2021 public meetings.

Notably, it will return to Cancun, Mexico, in the March for ICANN 70, just one year after hosting ICANN 67 there.

In both years, the dates appear to coincide with some US universities’ “Spring Break” academic holiday, which sees many college students descend on Cancun to take advantage to excess of Mexico’s more liberal drinking laws.

In June 2021, ICANN will head to the Hague in the Netherlands, perhaps also known for its more liberal attitude to inebriants, for its mid-year policy meeting.

It’s already named Seattle, home to several domain companies, as its choice for the final meeting of 2021.

Under ICANN’s system of dividing up the world into regions for the purpose of meetings rotation, Mexico counts as Latin America rather than North America.

Governments demand Whois reopened within a year

ICANN’s government advisers wants cops, trademark owners and others to get access to private Whois data in under a year from now.

The Governmental Advisory Committee wants to see “considerable and demonstrable progress, if not completion” of the so-called “unified access model” for Whois by ICANN66 in Montreal, a meeting due to kick off November 4 this year.

The demand came in a letter (pdf) last week from GAC chair Manal Ismail to her ICANN board counterpart Cherine Chalaby.

She wrote that the GAC wants “phase 2” of the ongoing Expedited Policy Development Process on Whois not only concluded but also implemented “within 12 months or less” of now.

It’s a more specific version of the generic “hurry up” advice delivered formally in last month’s Kobe GAC communique.

It strikes me as a ludicrously ambitious deadline.

Phase 2 of the EPDP’s work involves deciding what “legitimate interests” should be able to request access to unredacted private Whois data, and how such requests should be handled.

The GAC believes “legitimate interests include civil, administrative and criminal law enforcement, cybersecurity, consumer protection and IP rights protection”.

IP interests including Facebook want to be able to vacuum up as much data as they want more or less on demand, but they face resistance from privacy advocates in the non-commercial sector (which want to make access as restrictive as possible) and to a lesser extent registries and registrars (which want something as cheap and easy as possible to implement and operate that does not open them up to legal liability).

Ismail’s letter suggests that work could be sped up by starting the implementation of stuff the EPDP group agrees to as it agrees to it, rather than waiting for its full workload to be complete.

Given the likelihood that there will be a great many dependencies between the various recommendations the group will come up with, this suggestion also comes across as ambitious.

The EPDP group is currently in a bit of a lull, following the delivery of its phase 1 report to ICANN, which is expected to approve its recommendations next month.

Since the phase 1 work finished in late February, there’s been a change of leadership of the group, and bunch of its volunteer members have been swapped out.

Volunteers have also complained about burnout, and there’s been some pressure for the pace of work — which included four to five hours of teleconferences per week for six months — to be scaled back for the second phase.

The group’s leadership has discussed 12 to 18 months as a “realistic and desirable” timeframe for it to reach its Initial Report stage on the phase 2 work.

For comparison, it published its Initial Report for phase 1 after only six stressful months on the job, and not only have its recommendations not been implemented, they’ve not even been approved by ICANN’s board of directors yet. That’s expected to happen this Friday, at the board’s retreat in Istanbul.

With this previous experience in mind, the chances of the GAC getting a unified Whois access service implemented within a year seem very remote.