ICANN talks money and power at Malaysia meeting

July 2004

Perhaps not surprisingly, power and money are high on the agenda for the group that oversees Internet technical matters as it conducts a thrice-yearly meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia this week.

The board and members of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) will be grappling with a proposed doubling of ICANN's expenditures for fiscal year 2004/2005, initiatives to broaden the domain name system and continuing questions over how much governance -- if any -- the group should have over the Net.

The meeting comes on the heels of an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report that mostly applauds recent ICANN reforms on items such as domain names services, saying that the group has worked to promote fair competition and pricing.