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IANA Transition Project Costs

In the interest of transparency, information on the IANA transition costs is provided on this page. The scope of the costs included here includes the IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG) work, the Cross Community Working Group on Naming Related Stewardship Functions (CWG-Stewardship), the Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability (CCWG-Accountability) and any implementation work.

The cost categories include the cost of staff support, travel and meetings costs, professional services (including legal advice), and administrative costs. The costs disclosed are exclusively direct costs and do not include any overhead allocation.


Costs Summary

IANA Transition – Cost Summary – Inception to June 18

IANA Transition - Cost Summary

Costs Summary reports:

PCST

In agreement between the Board Finance Committee, the leaders of the SO/AC Chartering Organizations and the co-chairs of the CCWG, the Project Cost Support Team (PCST) was set up as a support function to the CCWG co-chairs for cost management purposes.

The PCST supports the project planning, providing costs information and analysis, and supporting forecasting.

The PCST also produces monthly reporting of the entire project's expenses:

  • to the CCWG co-chairs to support their management of the project: the expenses under their responsibility
  • to the chartering Organization and to the public for transparency and accountability: all expenses of the project.

PCST reports:

Personnel

For the IANA Transition project, ICANN has identified staff members involved in the project in a significant fashion. Significant is determined on the basis of an estimated percentage of time spent on the project at or exceeding 10% and can be as a result of an on-going activity carried out on a partial basis, or a dedicated full time effort during a limited period.

Travel & Meetings – Supported Travelers

The information in this section contains data concerning supported travelers as it relates to attending various IANA Transition related face to face meetings.

Legal Advice Costs

The costs included in this section are also included in the Costs Summary documents above but are focused on the legal advice incurred by ICANN with each of the three legal firms employed: Jones Day, Sidley & Austin, Adler & Colvin.

Note: When monthly invoices have not yet been received, estimates are requested from the legal firms. If no estimates are received from the legal firms, ICANN Finance produces an estimated monthly total cost, mainly based on historical trend.

Professional Services – Expenses Breakdown

The information in this section provides a more detailed understanding of the Professional Services expense category, included in the above summary information, for the period specified in each document below. The table below indicates, for each type, the names of the vendors who supplied the services rendered.

The Professional Services include Legal Advice Costs, which are disclosed in further detail in the preceding section.

Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."