More to the point: How is ICANN funded? Unless I'm mistaken, they are
funded by registrar/registry fees and, yes, application for new TLD
fees, all of which comes from a healthy domain industry. ...
Fully agree. It is flowing from many smaller players into a central
repository, ICANN. Thus, it makes more sense for that central
repository to pay for the technical underpinnings on which it relies
than to ask all the smaller players to pay a second tax (although
them doing so would certainly be welcomed as well).
Um, the IETF is funded by the domain industry right now. The .ORG
domain is owned by PIR, which funnels its surplus to ISOC, which uses
a part of that to fund the IETF. The 2009 ISOC budget says that
nearly all their revenue comes from .ORG, $15M from PIR vs $1.7M from
everything else. They budget $1.4 million to cover a combination of
IETF/IASA operations and $260K for IETF capital projects which I
gather means tools. The budget predicits a roughly constant IETF
contrubution other than tools, and an ISOC surplus of over $1M/yr
going forward, despite ramping up a lot of other projects. I get the
impression that in view of the gusher of cash arriving from PIR, if
the IETF presented a reasonable case for getting more money from the
ISOC, it would be hard for them to say no.
Over in ICANN land, the domain money arrives roughly half through the
registries, which mostly means Verisign, with Afilias (who handles the
back end for .ORG as well as other domains) and Neustar being the
other significant ones. The other half comes from registrars, Godaddy,
NSI, etc. ICANN, despite its nominal non-profit status, is vastly
profitable. The current FY10 budget has revenue of $63M, spending
$57M, with $5M left over. They expect their revenue just from .COM
registry fees to go from $12M to $18M due to raising the fee.
The budget for IANA, which also includes software tools used elsewhere
in ICANN, is $5M. To put it in perspective, that's about the same as
the entire IETF. It includes $150K spent on a consultant to tell them
about IANA's "business excellence", whatever that is.
If the IETF wants more money from ISOC or ICANN, it shouldn't be hard
to get. It would need some discipline to put together a budget, some
material on why it should be funded more from subsidy than from
increasing the meeting fees, and then go pitch it to our pals at ISOC
and ICANN.
R's,
John
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