On Nov 5, 2009, at 11:30 PM, John R. Levine wrote:
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.
I'm familiar with the 990. Your original comment addressed the entire
staff, and your last line above alludes to drawing an inference based
on staff and budget numbers. I've got a little bit of experience
reading these kinds of numbers. ICANN incurs rather substantial non
labor expenses due to its meetings and other matters. That, of
course, leads to a separate discussion about ICANN's meetings, but
let's not delve into that here.
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.
No, it's not too awful to contemplate. Far from it. As a matter of
prudent planning, consideration of the consequences of a root operator
refusing to update the root zone is definitely something that ought to
be part of contingency and disaster planning.
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.
You've just changed the subject from support for the root operators to
support for the IETF. The IETF situation was already discussed in
detail.
Steve
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