By Nick Patience

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), reportedly in the red to the tune of about $800,000 has relieved some of its most pressing short term financial concerns with $650,000 in loans from MCI Worldcom Inc and Cisco Systems Inc. ICANN had let it be known within the industry that it was in danger of going out of existence if money could not be found by the end of this month and ICANN supporters had warned of the supposedly dire consequences of this occurring.

Rumors that IBM Corp was ready with more money have so far not been confirmed, following earlier reports that the total loan would be about $1m. However ICANN outside counsel Joe Sims says talks with other companies are ongoing and these loans are part of a $2m fund-raising drive by the Californian non-profit that administers parts of the domain name system. The rest of the $2m will also be in the form of loans and is separate from any donations the organization might get. They are one-year unsecured loans with an interest rate of not more than 7%.

The ICANN board authorized interim president Mike Roberts to find loans to ameliorate the financial crisis facing the organization at a July 26 special board meeting. The next series of ICANN meetings begin tomorrow, August 24 in Santiago, Chile. The funding begs the question of how much influence these companies will now have over ICANN policy but the organization has always said publicly that influence cannot be bought no matter how much money is contributed.

Sims was being very coy Friday about where the next tranche of money is coming from and to whom ICANN is talking. The most likely source would still seem to be IBM, but John Patrick, the company’s VP of internet technology and one of the leaders of ICANN fund-raising drives is on vacation until later this week. The other main ICANN fund-raising protagonist is MCI senior VP Vint Cerf, hence the company’s input this time.

At Congressional hearings in July Roberts said that about $500,000 of the $800,000 were unpaid legal fees to Sims’ company Jones Day Reavis & Pogue in Washington DC and Roberts is thought not to have collected his $18,000-a-month salary for the past few months.

Patrick and Cerf are also intimately involved with the Global Internet Project (GIP), another non-profit organization that comprises a group of high-level executives from a variety of international technology companies which have been trying to raise money for ICANN for almost a year now. Sims says the funding efforts of the GIP and the efforts of Roberts and the interim ICANN chair Esther Dyson have become intertwined over time and are not really very separable. Nevertheless, the GIP is expected to announce a formal fund-raising drive for donations, rather than loans, very soon.