ICANN spends $5 million more than planned in first fiscal half

ICANN published its second fiscal quarter financials yesterday, revealing a roughly $5 million overspend in the second half of 2023.

The Org spent $72 million of its $74 million revenue in the six months to December 31, more than the $67 million spend it had budgeted for.

ICANN said the overspend came mainly in its Community and Engagement reporting segment, with the $4 million excess “driven by higher than planned costs for ICANN78, community programs, and meetings support”.

The same report shows that ICANN 78, which took place in Hamburg last October, cost about $900,000 more than expected largely because it spent more on air fares and had to put on more sessions than it originally expected.

It also spent about $100,000 on its 25th anniversary celebration, a line item that had not appeared in its budget. Because who can predict an anniversary, right?

Hamburg was the most-expensive meeting since the pandemic ended, costing about $5.4 million and attracting over 2,500 attendees. The Kuala Lumpur meeting a year earlier had cost $4.7 million.

ICANN’s revenue was described as “flat”, but a breakdown shows a roughly $1 million (rounded) shortfall in both registry and registrar transaction fees compared to the budget. This is likely linked to shrinkages in Verisign’s .com sales over the period.

ICANN turns down money from blockchain alt-root

It seems ICANN is turning down free money from blockchain alt-root providers, apparently as a matter of principle.

We hear one such alt-root, Freename.io, tried to sponsor the upcoming ICANN 78 meeting in Hamburg, but was rebuffed.

“At this time, ICANN is not interested in having Freename serve as a sponsor and will not be moving forward with a sponsorship agreement,” the Org told the company in an unsigned email.

Freename had offered to be a general sponsor, and not at the cheapest tier, I’m told.

ICANN sponsorship offers typically start in the low thousands but can get up to six figures at the higher tiers. Sponsorship is overall a very small part of ICANN’s revenue.

Org has become increasingly rattled in recent years with the proliferation of alt-roots, which have been gradually gaining market acceptance while ICANN’s own efforts to expand the domain universe languish in interminable policy knots.

ICANN delayed the sale of the UNR portfolio of gTLDs until buyers renounced their ownership rights to blockchain versions of their authoritative root strings.

Clearly, splashing an alt-root’s branding all over an ICANN stage would be seen as problematic.

Freename.io plans to attend the Hamburg meeting anyway.

CentralNic chief calls on industry to tackle climate change

CentralNic CEO Michael Riedl is calling on his counterparts at other large domain name registries and registrars to meet up to coordinate the industry’s response to climate change.

During a broad keynote at the London Domain Summit this morning, Riedl said that each domain company is too small to make an impact on the industry’s carbon footprint individually, and that coordination is needed.

He said the industry’s carbon footprint is currently “relatively reasonable” but said “we need to get it down to zero… together I’m pretty sure we can make an impact”.

Speaking to DI shortly after his speech, Riedl said he will soon invite industry leaders to a climate change “summit” in Hamburg, Germany, to coincide with ICANN’s 78th public meeting.

He said the domain industry needs to coordinate and standardize its approach to emissions, following the leads of other industries such as automotive.

He said he hoped he could get the CEOs of the big domain companies — he named Verisign and GoDaddy, who rarely send their CEOs to ICANN meetings — to show up.

Planning for the meeting is in the very early stages and Riedl said he has not spoken publicly about the initiative until today’s speech.

Hamburg selected for next year’s ICANN AGM

Better late than never? ICANN has picked Hamburg for its 25th annual general meeting, due to be held in October next year.

The ICANN board of directors made the selection at its meeting this weekend, just-published resolutions show.

The choice is hardly surprising. Hamburg had been the venue for the 2020 AGM, but it was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic. The city, along with DENIC and eco, said last December they were bidding for a second crack.

The specific venue was not disclosed, but the aborted 2020 meeting was due to take place at the Congress Center Hamburg, so one assumes that’s where the community will be headed next year.

While it will be ICANN’s 25th AGM, and I guess some kind of celebration will be in order, sadly ICANN 78 will be the wrong side of the country and in the wrong month to easily coincide with Oktoberfest.

The meeting is schedule for October 21 to 26 2023.

Hamburg to have second crack at hosting ICANN meeting

The City of Hamburg is to try again to bring in the ICANN crowd, after getting cancelled due to the pandemic last year.

German ccTLD registry DENIC, along with the city and local trade group eco, is taking a run at being selected as the host for ICANN 78, currently penciled in for October 2023, the company said this week.

It had been picked to host ICANN 69 in October 2020, but pandemic travel restrictions scuppered that opportunity.

The last six public ICANN meetings have been online-only, as will next March’s ICANN 73, which had been due to take place in Puerto Rico.

Hamburg’s chances would have to be said to be strong. Three other cancelled host cities — Kuala Lumpur, The Hague and Cancun — have already been confirmed for meetings in 2022 and 2023.

Of course, the ultimate decision-maker is a nucleic acid molecule wearing a spiky protein coat.

Holy Scheisse! Did you know ICANN 69 starts TOMORROW?

ICANN is starting its ICANN 69 public annual general meeting four days earlier than originally planned, and it appears to have only publicly announced the date change 24 hours in advance.

How’s that for transparency?

Usually, ICANN AGMs kick off formally on the Monday morning and run through the Thursday afternoon, but meetings between community groups start taking place the previous Friday, leading to a seven-day continuous meeting.

For ICANN 69, originally planned for Hamburg but now of course an online-only experience, ICANN has removed the Friday and weekend sessions and split the week in two.

There’ll be three “Community Days” from October 13 (which is tomorrow when I’m posting this but possibly today by the time you read it), three days off, and then four days of “Plenary Sessions”, beginning with the opening ceremony on Monday morning.

The community days include stuff like policy working group meetings, but they also include the top-level interactions between each constituency group, including the Governmental Advisory Committee, and the ICANN board of directors.

These traditional airing of grievances, usually on “constituency day” Tuesday, are where the tensions and hot topics of interest for the whole community are raised, and always worth listening to.

The decision to shake up the schedule appears to have been made some time in September. Last time I checked ICANN’s meetings page, September 2, it still showed the old October 17 start date.

What I find utterly baffling is that ICANN does not seem have made a formal public announcement of the date change, despite having blogged or made announcements about various aspects of the meeting several times.

I genuinely only found out today, reading this blog post that ICANN put out today, just one day before the meeting starts.

It certainly seems that the information has filtered out to the parts of the community that actually need to participate in the various sessions.

But what about the rest of us? Unless you’ve registered and logged in to the ICANN 69 web site since the changes were made, I’m not sure how you were meant to know.

Did you know?

I had plans to get my toenails done tomorrow.

ICANN decision to cancel Hamburg was NOT unanimous

Surprisingly, ICANN’s decision last week to cancel its Hamburg annual general meeting in favor of Zoom did not receive the unanimous support of its board of directors.

Two directors — Ihab Osman and Ron da Silva — voted against the majority in the June 11 resolution, minutes published last night show.

The resolution noted that the global path of the coronavirus pandemic is currently too unpredictable to ensure that an in-person ICANN 69 could go ahead safely or legally in October.

But the two directors dissented, pushing instead for a “hybrid” model meeting, with a greatly reduced in-person attendance propped up with online participation.

According to the minutes:

Ron expressed concerns that the decision to conduct ICANN69 as a purely virtual meeting is premature and indicated a preference for the President and CEO to explore with the SO and AC leadership the implications, costs and logistics around a hybrid approach for ICANN69. Ihab expressed concerns that the proposed resolution does not allow for the possibility of some sort of physical hybrid model for ICANN69.

Osman went further, arguing that ICANN should set an example by going ahead with Hamburg:

Ihab Osman pointed out that large parts of the world are moving towards opening up, and that ICANN, as global community and global player, has a responsibility to do its part to bring the world back to some level of normalcy.

While CEO Göran Marby came back with a bunch of reasons a physical meeting would be impractical and potentially unsafe, both directors were unconvinced and voted against the 13-person majority anyway.

Notes released alongside the minutes reveal that ICANN stands to save a lot of money by remaining online-only.

Not only will it not have to pay for hundreds of flights and hotel rooms for staff and subsidized community members, but it had not yet signed contracts with the venue or local hotels, so it won’t be losing any deposits either.

Will ICANN swap Hamburg for Zoom for 69?

ICANN’s board of directors is meeting this week to discuss arrangements for ICANN 69, and I think there’s a reasonable chance it will decide to take the meeting online-only.

The last official word from ICANN was that it is working on the assumption that normality will have resumed by September, and that October’s meeting could go ahead in Hamburg, Germany as planned.

But will it?

Current German coronavirus-related travel restrictions, which have been in place since March, forbid non-citizen incoming travelers from pretty much anywhere, even elsewhere in the EU.

Some travelers are being asked to self-quarantine for 14 days upon entry, which is obviously impractical for conference travel.

However, German is loosening its rules next week for EU travelers and will treat countries on a case-by-case basis, based on how many infections they’re recording at the time.

Americans will still not be allowed to travel to Germany and there’s no word on when the ban will be lifted.

German guidelines also currently prohibit any large gatherings of people, including conferences, until at least the end of August.

ICANN’s obviously going to have to do a bit of crystal ball-gazing, to guess whether business travel is going to be safe and permitted in October.

It’s also going to have to guess whether a large enough number of people will actually want to attend to make an in-person meeting worthwhile.

With many medical experts predicting a third-quarter resurgence of the pandemic, the so-called “second wave”, inviting guests from every continent to gather in the same room might be seen as risky.

Conferences in other industries that had been due to take place in Germany in October have been canceled or postponed.

Notably, Oktoberfest in Munich (which starts in September but runs into October) is not going ahead this year, but I’ve found examples of conventions in publishing, gaming and catering sectors that have also been canceled.

However, some events due to take place in March and April have been postponed UNTIL October, suggesting a level of confidence that the virus will be low-risk by that time.