DIDP #34 On granular detail on ICANNs budget for policy development process
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Internet Governance
Akriti Bopanna
6 July 2019
ICANN has Advisory Committees which help guide the policy recommendations that the ICANN community develops while its Supporting Organizations are charged with developing policy recommendations for a particular aspect of ICANNs operations. Supporting Organizations are composed of volunteers from the community. ICANN publishes a combined budget for all these bodies under the head of policy development and CIS inquired about the financial resources allocated to each of them specifically.
The ICANN budgets are published for public comment yet the community does not have supporting documents to illustrate how the numbers were estimated or the rationale for allocation of the resources. There is a lack of transparency when it comes to the internal budgeting.
This DIDP is concerned with the policy development budget which, as Stephanie Perrin of the Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group pointed out, was merely 5% of ICANN’s total budget, a number significantly low for a policy making organization. Thus, the information we request is a detailed breakdown for the budgets for every Advisory Council as well as Supporting Organizations for the previous fiscal year. You can find the attached request here.