By Kieren McCarthy
Published Friday 28th May 2004 20:54? GMT
The proposed 2004-5 budget for the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has hit a snag - the rest of the world is refusing to pay its share of the bill.
ICANN last week proposed a budget of $15.8m for next year, nearly twice as much as its current annual expenditure.
However, the Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries (CENTR) - an organisation which represents the Internet registries of 39 countries - is refusing to play ball.
In a letter dated 26 May [pdf], and addressed to Paul Twomey, the head of ICANN, this powerful body has revealed its irritation with ICANN's attempt to become a global Internet institution.
The three-page missive by CENTR chairman Paul Kane makes it plain that ccTLDs (country code top level domains) are unprepared to offer the additional finance that ICANN wants. Also the letter questions ICANN motives in seeking the budget hike.
ICANN knew it was liable to anger the rest of the world's countries by asking them for more money, so it increased the amount it asked from them by less than a third - where most others will have to pay double. ICANN even accepted that ccTLDs would pay less in "ICANN-tax" - 20 cents on a domain rather than the 25 cents for everyone else. This approach has been dismissed out of hand.
In its letter, CENTR accuses ICANN of a "lack of financial prudence" and refuses to support it "financially or otherwise" in its "unrealistic political and operational targets".
This is not good and at the centre of it lies the function of the Internet Assigned Names Authority (IANA) - which is the control panel of the Internet. The rest of the world is unhappy with the way ICANN uses its control over IANA. And ICANN will relinquish control of IANA over its dead body.
Unfortunately for ICANN, CENTR asks a legitimate question: how come that IANA has gone from costing $250,000 in 1996 to $5m next year when the amount of work has barely moved? That's a 20-fold increase, the letter points out.
"The draft budget seems inordinately high," the letter states, and threatens "last year, ICANN secured around $600,000 from ccTLD registries, it would be prudent to expect the global income from ccTLD registries for this year to be around the same" (our emphasis).
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