ICANNWatch | ICANN's Legal Bills

ICANN's Legal Bills
posted by Mueller on Tuesday April 27 2004, @07:40PM

Bruce Levinson writes "For the year ended June 30, 2002, ICANN spent over $1.1 million on the law firm of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue. ICANN's legal bills amounted to almost 20% of their total revenues for the year. ICANN's legal bills accounted for a similar percentage of their revenue in the previous year when their spending on outside counsel topped $1.4 million.

ICANN's legal costs appear to be quite high for such a modest-sized entity, particularly for a tax exempt, non-profit organization. Are ICANN's legal bills inflated by its functioning as a regulator rather than simply as a day-to-day technical manager of the internet?

The question of whether ICANN's legal expenses are being fueled by their extracurricular internet governance activities should be of importance both the Department of Commerce, which is responsible for overseeing ICANN, and to internet users around the world who are directly and indirectly funding the organization. ICANNfocus.org will continue to explore the implications of ICANN's role as an internet regulator."

Editors note: "Extracurricular?" ICANN Was born to regulate. It's first accomplishments were the domain name dispute resolution policy and the definition of registrar accreditation contracts, neither of which have anything to do with technical management of DNS."

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Unreasonable
by KarlAuerbach on Tuesday April 27 2004, @08:12PM (#13442)
User #3243 Info | http://www.cavebear.com/

As I pointed out in section 4.12 of my final report to ICANN (which is visible as an attachment at the end of http://www.cavebear.com/rw/senate-july-31-2003.htm [cavebear.com]) ICANN's legal bills have a long history of being more than merely unreasonable.

As far as I know, ICANN's board has not considered, much less acted upon, any of the five recommendations I made regarding its relationship with Jones Day.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:Unreasonable by jimrutt Thursday April 29 2004, @06:03AM

Re:Who is Paying the ICANNFocus Lobbying Bills?
by Mueller (muellerNO@SPAMsyr.edu) on Wednesday April 28 2004, @07:14PM (#13449)
User #2901 Info | http://istweb.syr.edu/~mueller/

If you'd care to post a story about ICANNFocus (hopefully one with evidence) we'd be happy to publish it.

The reference to "reading the ICANN website" I assume means that we could and should have read the budget ourselves. Well, some of us did. But ICANNWatch is a forum for many opinions, not just those of the editors, and if someone has their own view of the budget and it's interesting we'll publish it.

--MM

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