ICANN Gets $175,000 From 3Com & Starts Meeting
Section: 10. Internet
By Nick Patience
3Com Corp is the latest company to loan money to the Internet Corporation
for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN),
providing $175,000 in the form of a one-year unsecured loan. That brings
the total raised in the past few days to $825,000
with donations from Cisco Systems Inc and MCI Worldcom Inc; still a fair
way short of ICANN's target of $2m in loans. However
the organization is known to be talking to additional companies with a
view to securing more loans.
ICANN interim president Mike Roberts, reporting to the domain name
supporting organization gathering on the first day of the
latest round of ICANN meetings yesterday, said that the $800,000 deficit
at the end of the June was due to start-up expenses
that were $200,000 above their target, and about $600,000 less than
expected in donations from the private sector. To put the
financial situation in another perspective, Roberts said before Congress
in July that about $500,000 of the $800,000 was money
owed to the outside counsel, Joe Sims.
Tomorrow, Thursday sees the first ICANN board meeting that is open to the
public, both physically in Santiago, Chile and over
the web. However, since ICANN made the decision to open this week's
meeting, it has held two closed meetings by phone at
which it has made some crucial decisions, including the authorization to
seek the loans.
Money is also the main reason ICANN cites for it not having a membership
in place yet. Roberts told the meeting yesterday that
ICANN staff has estimated the cost of implementing an 'at large'
membership with a target of at least 5,000 members at
anywhere between $100,000 and $1m.
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Sally Khudairi . ZOT Group . http://www.zotgroup.com/
+1.617.818.0177 <sk@zotgroup.com>