[At-Large] ICANN PREGUNTAS

[Karl Auerbach]

Michele Neylon :: Blacknight wrote:

> The problem, as I see it in my rather naive view, is that ICANN has
> some wonderful individuals working for them, but that it's being
> crippled by the sheer size of its own bureaucracy.

ICANN does indeed have some very impressive people.  Patrick Sharry who 
supported us on the ALAC working group deserves a medal for his work. 
And he is not alone in the ICANN organization - ICANN has many people of 
great talent and who work long and hard hours with the most positive of 
motives and of high ethical values.  Their names are often unknown to 
us; they deserve recognition and our thanks.

But good talent needs to be channeled else it expends its energy 
inefficiently.

ICANN's board has not been a good manager; it has not tightly channeled 
or constrained its chosen executives.  (And those executives, in turn, 
have not constrained or channeled ICANN staff.)

The result has been an enormous amount of micro management burden on the 
board - the board is doing the work they should have delegated.  And as 
a result the board is too busy to look at the larger picture and hold 
ICANN to the straight and narrow road that it should be following.

And that, in turn, creates a situation in which ICANN expands like a 
balloon, as is the nature of bureaucracies that are not carefully 
controlled.  And this tendency is made the worse by the fact that 
certain aspects of ICANN, as well as some historical forces, have tended 
towards empire building by some people who seem to measure their worth 
by the extent of their org chart and budget or the number of travel 
miles they can accumulate every year.  And bloat rarely recedes - I have 
yet to find people who can make a cogent argument that ICANN's ombudsman 
function is working and worth retaining, yet I have not become aware of 
any efforts to eliminate that part of ICANN.

When I was on the board - my term ended in 2003 - there was an estimate 
that the most that ICANN's budget could ever reach was about $9,000,000 
USD. (And I considered that bloated.)  Yet here we are today with an 
ICANN budget that is reaching towards 10x that amount.

ICANN's budget is already on the order of 25% of the budget of the 
entire ITU!  In a few years at the current rate of growth ICANN's budget 
will match and even exceed that of the ITU.

		--karl--