The ALAC recognizes the continuous improvement in the Operating Plan and Budget establishment with more consultation with the community and a new evaluation model for the community additional request for funding.

The ALAC further recognizes that the level of detail in the budget presentation is now enhanced, and the explanations given allow its deep analysis and discussion. The separation of the stakeholder projects from the new gTLD readiness, the policy support, the community support and the global engagement activities represents one example of the so-called enhancement.

Regarding the IDN program, the ALAC find it important to make use as much as possible of the community members’ expertise that brings the linguistic source knowledge, which would minimize hiring external experts. The variant studies done by the 6 voluntary community member groups showed how useful the contribution of the community members can be. Besides, it may decrease drastically the program cost.

The ALAC believes that being part of the new gTLD application process, the TAS, the Digital Archery and the other system security of the new gTLD shouldn’t be counted in the core operation and project component of the budget, but in the new gTLD budget.

The ALAC welcomes the improvement in the interaction with the constituencies regarding the community additional requests. Nevertheless, the rejection of the projects planned in a non-ICANN event seems to be arbitrary, and yet, it could an outreach and communication operation since it would showcase the ICANN community work in the Internet ecosystem.

The ALAC notices with great satisfaction that ICANN will participate in the upcoming IGF differently, making use of its community initiatives. The coordination between ICANN management and the concerned constituencies for the preparation of the ICANN participation in such an event seems to the ALAC of great importance. The community workshops during the IGF bring to ICANN a significant visibility being a substantive contribution that has a great impact on its image.

Policy Development Support (P 18-19)

Capacity building for At-Large
ICANN Academy

(these two points are to be completed once cleared up by a response from ICANN Finance to an enquiry by Tijani Ben Jemaa)

On the other hand, the ALAC finds it abnormal that the global revenue of the Ombudsman increases by more than 28% because of an additional administrative cost for renting an office and the associated expenses.

The ALAC reiterates its concern about the huge disparity in the registry fees. They do not follow any rule and show an arbitrary way of charging the 18 existing gTLDs registries: some do not pay the fixed fees, others do not pay the per transaction fees, and the value of the fixed and the per transaction fees changes from a registry to another. We can notice that dot com does not pay the per transaction fees while the dot cat (community TLD) pays the per transaction fees at one of the highest rate ($ 1 per transaction) as well as the fixed fees.

Now that new gTLDs will be accredited, the ALAC does think that the community not for profit TLDs should be charged at a minimum rate while the rest of all TLDs should be charged uniformly according to well-defined rules

As for the ICANN offices, the ALAC notices that they are mainly located in North America. If all those offices are needed, it would be better to spread them differently to ensure regional coverage by keeping MDR and Brussels offices, and moving Sydney office to mainland Asia, Washington DC office to Africa and Palo Alto office to LAC region.

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