Case of ICANN Sponsorship — The Curious

Some interesting sponsors for next week’s ICANN conference.

Next week the domain name world will converge on Brussels for ICANN meeting number 38. It costs a lot of money to organize these ICANN meetings and the organization often comes under fire for this. To help defray the cost it offers various sponsorships.

There are a couple interesting sponsors for the upcoming meeting, most notably ICM Registry. As you might recall, ICM Registry is embroiled in a dispute with ICANN and is awaiting a decision by ICANN’s board on if it can move forward with offering the .xxx domain name. Some decision ought to be made next week.

Another sponsor is dotPro, which recently inked a renewal with ICANN to run the .pro registry. It also got a nice reduction in the amount it has to pay ICANN for each registration or renewal. That fee reduction is apparently funneled into sponsoring ICANN events.

Other sponsors include firms trying to shape the fresh TLD debate, such as .Irish, .Quebec, .Africa, and a number of incumbent registries.