ICANN must reduce its budget now!

Göran Marby, President and CEO of ICANN, seems to pretend that he doesn’t understand how much more money than it should ICANN is spending every year.

He published a blog post called “Budget Discussions at ICANN61“. He starts by saying:

“During ICANN61, a major topic of conversation was the FY19 draft Budget and Operating Plan. As you’ve heard from me, 80-85 percent of our budget is already committed to certain projects that are in our Bylaws, our contracts, our operations, and other fixed costs. This means that roughly 15-20 percent of the overall budget can be considered when we are looking at ways to decrease our spending. We must work together to determine the best allocation of the remaining funds, because this is your decision, not mine.”

What exactly do you mean by committed? You mean your salaries are committed. Right? And the contracts with the expensive consultants are committed. And the expensive travel expenses and personal expenses are committed. Why don’t you “uncommit” some of that for 2020 then?

Here are some highlights from the proposed ICANN 2019 budget:

• ICANN will cost us $138M in 2019!
• The FY19 budget proposal significantly increases personnel costs by $7.3M to $76.8M!
• Travel & Meetings are going to cost $15.6M (reduced but still too high!)
• Professional Svcs. will cost $23.4M (???)
• 34 people are going to be hired in 2018 and 4 in 2019

Here are a few ideas to reduce the ICANN budget:

1. Reduce all salaries AND bonuses by 20% now. I don’t care if your salaries are competitive or not in the US of some other countries. You don’t even do half the work people do in the private sector.
2. ICANN says that about 10%-15% of people leave the company every year. So don’t hire any more people after they leave. What do you need 425 people for? What more do you do now that you didn’t do in 2014? ($45M in 2014)
3. If you need to hire people then hire them in some less expensive countries.
4. Do some work done yourself. ICANN has more staff (425 people by the end of 2019!) than ever before yet they can accomplice nothing. All they do is ask for volunteers to do their jobs or hire expensive consultants.
5. Have less meetings per year. 3 meetings are too much. 1 should be enough.
6. Somehow I don’t think that your Bylaws command spending so much money every year. If they do then change them!

If you don’t like my ideas then find your own! ICANN cannot cost registrants $138M per year! Period!

ICANN should never cost more than one third (or less!) of what it costs today. It seems that the more money they have coming in the more money they spend. This is how a bureaucratic public sector in a corrupted government would work. And of course like any bureaucratic public sector they get nothing done except make the lives of other people more difficult, hence they nickname: ICANNT.