As near as I can make out, ICANN collects bucketloads of cash without
really having any idea why. The only rationale seemed to be to pay a
rather surprising large salary to the CEO.
Agreed, except for the surprise part. The whole staff is paid
impressively large amounts and has been as long as I've been watching
ICANN. They seem to feel that their peer organizations for
compensation purposes are investment banks rather than other
non-profits.
Instead they are currently looking to raise even more money through
the sale of TLDs but last time I heard were curiously uninterested in
providing any material support to the root operators who would be
bearing the expense of supporting these new domains.
If I were a root server operator, it would take an implausibly large
amount of money to be worth the strings that ICANN would attach. A
key reason that the DNS still works is that there's no root server
contract, so the root operators can individually or jointly tell ICANN
to pound sand if they don't care for the root zone that ICANN offers
them. Hence ICANN is very cautions about changes.
R's,
John
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