Budget revolt over domain names

By PAUL BRISLEN

The international body that governs the internet, ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), is facing a revolt from members over its proposed budget for 2004-05 which has doubled spending to US$15.8 million ($25.2 million).

New Zealand may join other member states of the California-based organisation in boycotting the payment of fees, citing concerns over the level of government involvement, especially from the United States.

New Zealand's internet society, InternetNZ, is expected to help foot the bill. But its international affairs committee chairman, Peter Dengate Thrush, says the society was supporting the internet corporation's position but will maintain a watching brief.

InternetNZ has withheld ICANN funding in the past on a separate issue. "We support the concepts ... of industry self-regulation of the internet, a transparent bottom-up international process and a very limited role for government," says Dengate Thrush.

The internet corporation has released a paper outlining its plans and although those changes remain on the agenda InternetNZ will continue to support it.

However, the Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries is refusing to pay its share of the bill and questions whether the corporation is acting appropriately, in particular with its funding of the Internet Assigned Names Authority (IANA), which manages the running of the world's domain names.

According to the chairman ofthe European council, Paul Kane, the annual cost of running IANA has increased from US$250,000 in 1996 to almost US$5 million today without any real increase in workload.

"Today [IANA undertakes] the same administrative task of maintaining the authoritative list of approximately 260 domains and performing a total of 78 transactions in a six-month period."

Dengate Thrush says InternetNZ agrees with the European position, especially when it comes to instituting a "per domain name charge".

"The number of domain names registered in New Zealand makes no difference to the job IANA does."

To compound the corporation's problems, the International Telecommunications Union is also investigating the issue of internet governance and has proposed a working group to look into who should run the internet, to report back to the United Nations by November 2005.

Dengate Thrush says while ICANN continues to talk about limiting the role of government in the running of the internet, InternetNZ will support it over the union's approach, which would involve governments to a far greater degree.