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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