ICANN should not be a travel/vacation club for insiders

[George Kirikos <gkirikos@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

I've long criticized the waste of money that ICANN has perpetuated, in which 
professional freeloaders use ICANN for free vacations/holidays, or use it to 
subsidize consulting gigs that they do on the side, using ICANN's "ecosystem" 
for commercial use. The number of physical meetings should be decreased, and 
the use of remote technologies should be vastly increased. This also allows for 
increased transparency and accountability, as remote technologies are recorded, 
whereas "backroom deals" conducted in restaurants and hotel lounges are not.

Millions of dollars are wasted. If one does the math, it would be cheaper to 
simply give these freeloaders 42" HDTVs, Verizon FiOS high speed connections 
and videocams to do teleconferencing. Of course, most of the freeloaders 
already have these luxuries, but value the all-expenses paid holidays that 
ICANN routinely provides its insiders and friends.

To demonstrate that ICANN is a travel club, one need only look at the stats for 
the Fellowship Program on the ICANN dashboard:

http://forms.icann.org//idashboard/public/

(click on Global Partnerships, and then "Fellowship Program")

It's a fact that 181 freeloaders applied to go to the Paris, France meeting. 
Only 67 applied for the New Delhi, India meeting. If these applicants were 
truly interested in "policy", which they pretend to be, the number of 
applicants per meeting should be roughly equal. However, that is not the case. 
Instead, more attractive holiday destinations (like fabulous Paris in a 
first-world country) get far more applicants than less attractive holiday 
destinations like India.

Furthermore, no metrics are ever provided as to how much these freeloaders 
participate in ICANN policy development, in particular in written comment 
periods. The number of comments on important issues like new TLDs, etc. are 
roughly ZERO from these professional free vacation-seekers.

Instead, the same financial resources should either be rebated back to 
consumers through lower fees (i.e. eliminate the items from the budget 
entirely). Alternatively, on important ICANN matters registrars should be 
compelled to send ICANN policy change notices (or requests for comments or 
announcements) to all domain name registrants by email. Then, instead of 
getting only 2 or 3 comments on issues, there would be hundreds or even of 
thousands of comments from an actively engaged and educated group of consumers.

Of course, ICANN doesn't want the public to know what it's doing, as 
demonstrated by their failure in Reconsideration Request 10-1:

http://www.icann.org/en/announcements/announcement-19apr10-en.htm

They had the opportunity to provide recordings and full transcripts of all 
Board meetings to the public, but refused.

Thus, given ICANN's history, I expect that ICANN will perpetuate their vacation 
club for insiders, and ignore the opportunity to educate and bring in millions 
of domain registrants to the ICANN policy-making process. However, I hold out 
hope that one day regime-change or oversight by the US government/DOC/NTIA will 
bring in the proper changes, so we submit this comment on the record to 
encourage the overseers to do the right thing.

Sincerely,

George Kirikos
http://www.leap.com/