Finance

ICANN's Revenue Model

ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is a nonprofit organization responsible for managing and coordinating the domain name system (DNS) and the allocation of IP addresses. ICANN's revenue model is primarily based on a fee structure that supports its operations and activities. Here are the key components of ICANN's revenue model:

  1. Domain Name Registry Fees: ICANN charges a fee to registries, which are entities responsible for operating and managing top-level domains (TLDs) such as .com, .org, .net, and country-code TLDs like .uk or .de. These fees are typically based on a percentage of the registry's transaction revenue or a fixed fee per domain registration.
  2. Domain Name Registrar Accreditation Fees: ICANN accredits domain name registrars, which are companies that offer domain registration services to the public. Registrars pay an initial accreditation fee and annual fees to ICANN based on the number of domain names they manage.
  3. IP Address Allocation Fees: ICANN oversees the allocation and management of IP addresses through its regional Internet registries (RIRs). RIRs charge fees to organizations requesting IP address allocations or assignments, and ICANN receives a portion of these fees to support its activities.
  4. New Generic Top-Level Domains (gTLDs): ICANN introduced the new gTLD program, allowing the creation of customized domain extensions beyond traditional ones like .com or .org. ICANN charges application fees from organizations seeking to operate new gTLD registries. Additionally, ICANN receives ongoing fees from the operation of these gTLD registries.
  5. Auction Proceeds: In cases where multiple organizations apply for the same new gTLD, ICANN may conduct an auction to determine the winning applicant. The proceeds from these auctions contribute to ICANN's revenue.
  6. Support from ccTLD Registries: Country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) registries, such as .uk or .de, operate under agreements with ICANN. These agreements may include financial contributions from the ccTLD registries to support ICANN's mission and activities.
  7. Other Contributions: ICANN also receives voluntary contributions from various stakeholders, including domain name registries, registrars, Internet service providers (ISPs), and other organizations that recognize the importance of ICANN's work.

Finance Committee of the Board (BFC)[1]

The ICANN Board's Finance Committee is responsible for:

consulting with the President on ICANN's annual budget process; reviewing and making recommendations on the annual budget submitted by the President; and developing and recommending long range financial objectives for ICANN. The Finance Committee of the ICANN Board was established by resolution on 13 December 2000.

Current Members[2]

Danko Jevtović

Chair

Danko is an Internet pioneer from Serbia. He was a founding partner in SezamPro, one of the first ISPs in Serbia and an initiator of reform in the then .YU country code top level domain (ccTLD). Subsequently, he was a member of the Board of Governors and later the Chief Executive Officer of the Serbian Internet Domain Names Registry (.RS ccTLD). In addition, Danko was a board member of CENTR (Association of European ccTLD registries) and a member of the UN IGF Multistakeholder Advisory Group. Danko is a digital governance and policy expert. He holds a BA in Management of Information Systems from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, an Executive MBA from the IEDC, Bled School of Management, Slovenia, and he is a certified corporate director by INSEAD France and USA NACD. Danko was nominated to serve on the ICANN Board by the Nominating Committee in 2018. His term will expire at the Annual General Meeting 2024.

Harald Alvestrand

Non-Voting Membe

Harald Alvestrand was born in Norway in 1959, and graduated from the Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH) in 1984. Since then, he became a leading figure in the Norwegian internet growth while working for UNINETT (the university network of Norway). Harald has also worked for Norsk Data, EDB Maxware and Cisco Systems. Since 2006, Harald has been working as an engineer for Google. He has participated on various projects during his time at Google, serving as the standards coordinator for the WebRTC project in his most recent one. He has been active in Internet standardization via the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) since 1991, and has written a number of RFCs, including RFC 1766, the first standard for language tags in Internet protocols. In the IETF, Harald has been an area director of the Applications area (1995-1998) and of the Operations & Management area (1998-1999; a member of the Internet Architecture Board (1999-2001), and served as chair of the IETF from 2001 to 2006. He was alternate chair of the ICANN DNSO General Assembly from December 1999 to April 2001, and was a member of the WIPO panel of experts on the DNS in 1998-1999. Harald is a former board member of NORID (the .no domain name registry), ICANN and the Unicode Consortium. He lives in Trondheim, Norway, is married, and has 3 children. Harald Alvestrand has been appointed as non-voting technical liaison to the ICANN Board by the IETF.

Becky Burr

Member

J. Beckwith (“Becky”) Burr is a partner at Harris, Wiltshire & Grannis, LLP, a Washington, DC law firm. Her practice focuses on data protection, data governance, and cyber security. Prior to joining the firm, Becky was Neustar’s Deputy General Counsel and Chief Privacy Officer. In that capacity, she was responsible for implementing the company’s “privacy by design” program, and ensuring that the company maintained state-of-the-art privacy and data security to protect customer and consumer information. As an expert on Internet governance issues, Ms. Burr also provided policy and legal advice related to the company’s provision of Internet domain name registry services. Becky joined Neustar in 2012 from the Washington, DC office of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr, where she was a partner in the Communications, Privacy and Internet Law Practice Group and the Financial Institutions Practice Group. Her practice was both regulatory and transactional, focused on e-commerce, information technology, intellectual property licensing, and international regulation of communications and information technology. She was recognized as a Nationwide Leader in the Privacy and Data Security field in the 2007- 2012 editions of Chambers USA: America’s Leading Lawyers in Business (Global 2011-2012) and selected by her peers for inclusion in the 2007- 2012 editions of The Best Lawyers in America, in the area of information technology law. Prior to joining WilmerHale, Becky served as the Associate Administrator and Director of International Affairs and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), where she was responsible for the privacy and Internet governance work streams described in the Clinton Administration’s Framework for Global Electronic Commerce. She also served as an Attorney Advisor at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) from 1995 – 1997, where she participated in developing the FTC’s approach to competition, consumer protection, and privacy/data protection in the digital marketplace. Becky’s history with ICANN dates back to 1997 when she headed NTIA’s Office of International Affairs and participated in the U.S. Government (USG) team that produced the so-called “Green Paper” and “White Paper” on privatization of the domain name system. As head of NTIA’s Office of International Affairs, Becky was responsible for recognizing ICANN on behalf of the USG in 1998, and for negotiating the original Registry Agreement and Registrar Accreditation Agreement. She served as the U.S. representative to the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) in ICANN’s early years and, after leaving the USG in late 2000, represented registries, registry operators, and registrars in their dealings with ICANN as a lawyer in private practice. In that capacity, Becky represented individual sponsored and new gTLD applicants, as well as the Registrar Stakeholder Group in negotiating the 2013 Registrar Accreditation Agreement. From 2006 through 2016, Becky served on the Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO) Council, first as a Nominating Committee (NomCom) appointee, and more recently as the representative of .US. Becky received a BA from Yale (1977), and a JD from Georgetown University Law Center (1987). She was selected by GNSO to serve on the Board commencing at the Annual General Meeting in 2016. She will begin her second term at the Annual General Meeting 2019.

Edmon Chung

Member

Edmon Chung is a social innovator and entrepreneur. Edmon currently serves as the CEO of DotAsia Organisation, serves on the Executive Committee of Internet Society Hong Kong (ISOC HK), the Board of Make a Difference (MaD) Institute, and heads the secretariat for the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum (APrIGF). Edmon served also on the founding board of the Internet Governance Forum Support Association (IGFSA), continues to support its secretariat, cofounded the annual Hong Kong Kids International Film Festival (KIFF.Asia), and participates extensively on Internet governance and social innovation matters. Edmon is an inventor of patents of internationalized domain names (IDN) and email addresses technologies, and has served on many global IDN related technical and policy groups, that made possible the introduction of multilingual domain names and email addresses on the Internet. Edmon won the Most Innovative Award in the Chinese Canadian Entrepreneurship Award in 2001. In 2000, Edmon was selected by The Globe and Mail as one of the Young Canadian Leaders.

Between 2006 and 2010, Edmon served on the ICANN Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) Council, between 2010 and 2012 on the ICANN At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC), and between 2006 and 2011, as an elected member of the Elections Committee of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region in the Information Technology Subsector. Edmon has a Bachelor of Applied Science and Master of Engineering from the University of Toronto. He was nominated to serve on the ICANN Board by the Nominating Committee in 2021. His term will expire at the Annual General Meeting in 2024.

Avri Doria

Member

Avri Doria is an independent researcher and educator based in Providence, RI, with a number of contracts with both non-governmental organizations and within the Internet technical community. As a technologist, Avri has been involved in the development of Internet protocols and architectures for over 30 years. She has been active in ICANN policy since 2005 and was nominated to serve on the ICANN Board by the Nominating Committee in 2017. Her term will expire at the Annual General Meeting in 2023. Avri was awarded the ICANN Multistakeholder award in 2014.

León Sánchez

Member

León Sánchez is an intellectual property attorney graduated from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City. He also completed postgraduate studies in intellectual property at the UNAM and Internet Law at Harvard Law School. Since 2006 he has been a partner at Fulton & Fulton, a law firm specialized in intellectual property and IT law based in Mexico City, and is Head of the Intellectual Property division. Mr. Sanchez also serves on the Board of Directors for Trustnet Corporate Group, ISDI Mexico and several other non-for-profit organizations in Mexico. Since 2008 Mr. Sanchez is professor of Intellectual Property at the UNAM Law School. He has been an advisor to different Government bodies, including the Digital Strategy Coordination Office of the Mexican Presidency, the Special Commission on Digital Agenda and IT of the Mexican House of Representatives and the Science and Technology Commission of the Mexican Senate. He drafted the Internet Users Rights Protection Act for Mexico and has been very active on issues like ACTA, SOPA, TPPA and other local initiatives of the same kind, always advocating to defend users’ and creators’ rights in order to achieve a balance between regulation and freedom. Mr. Sanchez has served in ICANN as the At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) Vice-Chair and Co-Chair of the Cross Community Working Group (CCWG) on Accountability where he has been deeply involved with the IANA Stewardship transition process. Mr. Sanchez was elected by the At-Large community to be its designated Director on the ICANN Board of Directors from 2017 to 2020. He was elected by the At-Large community of individual Internet users worldwide to serve as an ICANN Board Director for a three-year term (November 2017 - November 2020).

Personnel

  • SVP, Planning and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) - Xavier Calvez
  • Senior Director, Finance and Accounting.
  • Senior Financial Analyst III
  • Finance Manager
  • Director, Accounting
  • Senior Accountant
  • Senior Accountant, APAC
  • Billing, Accounts Receivable and Collections Specialist III
  • Manager, Billing Operations
  • Accounts Payable Specialist II
  • Global Compensation and Benefits Director
  • Sr. Business Analyst
  • Accounts Payable Lead