Hefty price tags to sponsor March event.
I’ve written before about the relationship between ICANN and sponsors of its meetings. It looks like ICANN has upped the ante for its Spring meeting in San Francisco.
As Kevin Murphy spotted today, ICANN has new sponsorship tiers for its next meeting reaching up to $500,000. VeriSign, which brings in over a half billion a year in fees on .com and .net through a contract with ICANN, has already signed up at the $500,000 Diamond Level.
If your budget is smaller you might consider the Platinum Elite level, which sounds like an airline frequent flyer level to me. That will only set you back $250,000, and you get a whopping $5,000 credit toward sponsoring a future meeting.
So far the field is open as VeriSign is the only company to sign up.
Gnanes says
Why does these meetings cost so much?
Louise says
That’s a whopper!
Verisign at least owes ICANN a “thank you” for passing its BTAPPA – Bulk Transfer After Partial Portfolio Acquisition . . . its stock turned north at that juncture to the tune of 94%. Check it from July 2009 (the month BTAPPA passed) to current: VRSN Chart on Yahoo.
Theobroma Cacao says
@Gnanes: ICANN meetings have on the order of 1000 attendees, multiple concurrent sessions, _very_ extensive requirements for on-site Internet as well as facilities for remote participation, simultaneous real-time translation and transcription services (often for concurrent sessions), etc., etc. Until/unless you’ve actually tried to do something similar on the scale ICANN tries to do, I suspect you have no idea how expensive and hard it is.
Oh yeah, and ICANN doesn’t charge attendees anything.
Lucas says
I agree with Louise: verisign gets a ton of money from registrants through their hyper-inflated renewal fees. All this possible because ICANN has this no-bidding contract with them.
It’s hypocrithical to say the least that ICANN is about to creat all the mess of companies having their own TLD in the name of “promoting competition”, while such a basic flaw in competition is on the table for years.