Features • 1) Holding ICANN Accountable: IRS Form 990 and ICANN Accountability & Transparency--Disclosure of compensation paid to ICANN Chairman Steve Crocker and/or his personal corporation Shinkuro, Inc. 2)Other ICANN news, 3) ICYMI: Fragmented ‘Splinternet’, 4) Investing: Q2 2017 Earnings Webcasts, Rightside $NAME Class Action, 5) Most Read Posts.
1) Holding ICANN Accountable: IRS Form 990 and ICANN Accountability & Transparency--Disclosure of compensation paid to ICANN Chairman Steve Crocker and/or his personal corporation Shinkuro, Inc.
ICANN filed its Form 990 (pdf, 5.54 MB) for the fiscal year ending 30 June 2016 (FY16) with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on 12 May 2017:
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| Above: excerpts from ICANN's FY16 IRS Form 990 |
My email to ICANN (pdf) on May 28, 2017, and the initial response from ICANN is here (pdf). The substantive response from ICANN (pdf), dated July 13, 2017, received this past week is embedded in full below following this excerpt:
"The ICANN Chairman’s Corporation, Shinkuro, Inc. was paid a total of $114,203.24 in the fiscal year 2016. The total amount comprised of $75,000.00 for compensation and $39,203.24 for office rent ... ICANN will be publishing a revision to the FY16 Annual Report of Expense Reimbursement and Other Payments to or on behalf of ICANN Board members, with the objective to clarify all the amounts that have been paid to Shinkuro, Inc., and/or Steve Crocker in relation to Steve Crocker’s role as Chair of the Board (or as Board member, prior to his appointment as Chair)."--Xavier Calvez, ICANN CFO, letter to John Poole, Editor of Domain Mondo, July 13, 2017, embed below (highlighting added).
While I will leave to others, including the IRS, to judge ICANN's interpretation of relevant tax provisions, including ICANN's treatment and classification of funds paid to individuals and their "personal corporations," unfortunately, Mr. Calvez did not address the following questions (highlighted below) in my email of May 28, 2017 (pdf), which will require a follow-up email this coming week to Mr. Calvez (w/ copy to the ICANN Ombudsman):
2) Other ICANN news
".brand raised $123M for ICANN to pay for the lucrative salaries and conferences." (Editor's note: $185,000 application fee x 664 .BRAND TLD applications= $122.84M.)For a glimpse of the future 'global DNS nightmare' ICANN is foolishly creating for itself and the global internet community (via a new gTLDs program and policies driven by greed, incompetence, cronyism, and conflicts of interest), read Could the next new gTLD round last 25 years? Or 70 years? | DomainIncite.com: "Will the next new gTLD round see 25,000 applications? If so, how long will it take for them all to go live?"
Perhaps the answer is to build a new internet (and new internet root zone) coordinated by an entity other than ICANN which is proving itself too inept or corrupt to fulfill its purported mission.
b. Post-ICANN59 Policy Report | ICANN.org (pdf)
c. ICANN Data Protection and Privacy Issues | ICANN.org: a current listing of ongoing projects at the ICANN organization related to data protection and privacy matters including (a) GNSO Policy Development Processes and Implementation, (b) WHOIS Conflicts Procedure, and (c) European Union General Data Protection Regulation.
3) ICYMI Internet Domain News
- The World May Be Headed for a Fragmented ‘Splinternet’ | WIRED.com: "... The trend of courts applying country-specific social media laws worldwide could radically change what is allowed to be on the internet, setting a troubling precedent. What happens to the global internet when countries with different cultures have sharply diverging definitions of what is acceptable online speech? What happens when one country's idea of acceptable speech clashes with another's idea of hate speech? ..."
- China Tells Carriers to Block Access to Personal VPNs by February | Bloomberg.com: 2018 deadline to stop individuals from accessing global web, tightening controls come amid Xi’s goal of "cyber-sovereignty."
- Venezuela: Citizens know the 'news' "isn’t matching the reality they are living."--CSMonitor.com
4) Investing
- T-Mobile $TMUS July 19 4:30pm EDT
- Qualcomm $QCOM July 19 4:45pm EDT
- Alphabet $GOOG $GOOGL July 24 5pm EDT
- Facebook $FB July 26 5pm EDT
- Twitter NYSE: $TWTR July 27 7am EDT
- Verisign $VRSN July 27 4:30pm EDT
- Amazon $AMZN July 27 5:30pm EDT
- Apple $AAPL Aug 1 5pm EDT
- GoDaddy $GDDY Aug 8 5pm EDT
5) Most read posts (# of pageviews Sun-Sat) this past week on DomainMondo.com:
1. News Review: ICANN's Extortionate .BRAND Scam Failing
2. Evolution of Starbucks $SBUX & Coffee (video)
3. a16z VC Marc Andreessen On Tech Valuations and More (podcast)
-- John Poole, Editor, Domain Mondo