Today the public portion of the ICANN meeting begins.  Several of the Board Committees have already met, task forces have been working on WHOIS and new TLD policies, and the Board itself has already spent a long afternoon discussing what's going on.  But we start the public portion with a little ritual of welcome and speech-making. This is the 29th ICANN meeting.

Doug Brent, Chief Operating Officer of ICANN (presentation here), is noting that ICANN has net revenue of US$46.6 million, and expenses of $41 million.  But it looks as if revenue will actually be more like $50 million.  (!)  So perhaps ICANN should reduce transaction fees that it collects from registrars.  (Most of ICANN's revenue comes from registrants paying registrars, and registrars paying fees on to ICANN.)  And Doug is suggesting that a large reserve fund is being contemplated.  Are we doing meetings in the most cost-effective way? he asks.  Doug also says we could present data better to everyone.  What's driving our spending?  $1.6 million on new gTLDs, $1 million on ALAC and outreach, almost a million on IDN, compliance about $800K, $700K on legal, $530K on registrar data escrow, $400K on economic assistance (by economists).

Wow.  $50 million.  That's just enormous.  But no one's stirring in the crowd - just a lot of typing all around me.

The mike opens up now, questions for Doug, Tina Dam (re IDN), and Paul Twomey (CEO) are timely.  No one approaches the mike.  Now what?  I guess we'll close this session.  I start a workshop at noon on registrant protection.

AHA!  No, Amadeu Abril comes up.  He says it's a shame not to have public comments.  (Bravo!)  He asks what implementation process will be for IDNs - what sort of rollout will we have next autumn.  Vint says we'll be talking about that this week -- new gTLDs and IDN TLDs are the same.  We should treat them all as new TLDs.  "So the ensemble of TLDs expressed using internationalized characters needs to be treated as a whole..  this coalesces into a common expression."  (This is a point of view with which I agree.)  Vint goes on -- "I'm not sure that "translations" are a practice that we should endorse - I'd rather see proposals for new TLDs that are specific and unique."  I agree.