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Re: our pals at ICANN, was Circle of Fifths

2009-11-05 23:30:55
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.

I don't have access to the salaries of individual employees, and I doubt you do either. ...

Hi, Steve. As you know, ICANN is a legally incorporated as a public charity operating for the public benefit, exempt from taxes under IRS code section 501(c)(3). Like every exempt organization, it files an annual financial statement on IRS Form 990, which includes the amounts paid to the highest paid employees and contractors and is available for public inspection. The most recent 990 I can find online is from 2007.

It says that ICANN paid CEO Paul Twomey $691,610 plus $255,649 pension contribution. They paid COO Doug Brent $390,939 plus $98,412 pension plus $23,804 expenses. They paid General Counsel John Jeffrey $314,500 plus $63,982 pension. They paid VP Kutt Pritz $318,846 plus $79,627 pension. They paid VP Thressa Swinehart $251,497 plus $62,916 pension. They paid VP David Conrad $197,779 plus $53,028 pension. They paid VP Denise Michel $235,722 plus $52,500 pension, plus an impressive $115,649 expenses, presumably living expenses in Brussels. They paid Ombudsman Frank Fowlie an astonishing $437,727 via his consulting corporation in Canada. They didn't pay you anything.

There's more, but this is plenty to get the idea. To approximate what everyone else is paid it's easy enough to look at the staff and budget numbers, and it's quite clear nobody is underpaid.

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. ...
This is multiple pieces of nonsense:

I actually don't think we have any serious disagreement here. ICANN's management of the root zone is cautious for all sorts of reasons, and as you note the root server operators have no plans to say no to what ICANN offers them. It's always been clear that one reason is that the consequences if any of the root servers felt unable or unwilling to accept ICANN's root would be too awful to contemplate, so it'll never happen.

But to return to the original issue, ICANN has plenty of money if they wanted to support the IETF. But the IETF needs to get organized enough to ask in a way to which you and the rest of the board can say yes.

R's,
John
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