[Comments-travel-support-guidelines-30may18] My contribution to the question of ICANN Community Travel Support Guidelines

[Mark W. Datysgeld]

I am Mark W. Datysgeld, a policies researcher and consultant from Brazil, specialized in public and private policymaking, and affiliated with the Business Constituency (BC). I have attended ICANN both benefitting from its outreach programs and under my own expense over the course of the past 3 years. I have also been a proactive supporter of the NextGen program, and since meeting 54 have helped those entrant actors to make a better use of their time and resources before, during and after the meetings they are selected for, maximizing the investment made by the community on them.

I write this comment under my personal capacity, but hope to represent the overall sentiment of others who have had the pleasure of participating in the NextGen program.

A matter that I feel the need to stress, and that is not being tackled at all as the document stands, is the matter of "Wire Transfer and Foreign Exchange Fees/Losses". According to the draft Community Travel Support Guidelines, the fact of the matter is that "foreign exchange fees/losses" are acceptable, and ICANN is willing to reimburse the traveler if a wire transfer fee exceeds USD 50, as long as a justification is sent to ICANN Travel Support.

There are two individual problems contained in that statement, which need to be taken into consideration separately:

1)	No matter how you slice it, this is wasting community money and giving it away to banks who charge extortion fees for performing simple international transactions. The reality, as far as the developing world is concerned, is quite grim, seeing as banks feel entitled to tax these transactions at caps that often exceed 20%, without offering any particular benefit in exchange. To add insult to injury, most will convert the dollar to local currency at the worst market rate available.

2)	I absolutely refute the affirmation that ICANN Travel Support is willing to engage in reimbursing these fees, as in the several cases that I observed or have been personally affected by this, there has been no willingness to do anything of the sort. Even if they did, that statement in itself does not make much sense. How would they perform that reimbursement? By wiring money using the same method to the same bank only to have more resources syphoned away?

Let’s not keep this at a speculative level: a stipend is given to the NextGen attendants to account for additional expenses incurred during the meeting. For the purposes of meeting 52, the Latin American NextGen were given a total amount of 500 dollars to account for their additional expenses. That is a more than fair amount of money on paper, but let’s have a look at what happened to that money after it is wired from ICANN. First, Latin American banks engaged in confusing internal procedures that produced upwards of 2 weeks of delay for the receiving of the money, sometimes requiring recipients to physically go to their agencies to authorize the transaction and sign an acceptance letter of the extortion fees that were to come.

Once fees were applied and very unfavorable dollar rates were used to do the conversion, the money that actually ended up arriving in the account of several of them was around 380 dollars. Now, let’s not focus on whether or not that is enough, but rather: where did those 120 dollars go? Simple: nowhere. They served only to feed the predatory practices of a Latin American bank that relies on the lack of adequate consumer protection coupled with questionable government regulations to apply such brutal fees.

Now, those are 120 dollars wasted out of our pockets, the community’s collective pockets, for every NextGen that attends the meeting. How that has come to be seen as acceptable is beyond me. It is not acceptable. 120 dollars is very far from being chump change, it amounts to as much as the minimum wage in certain regions of the continent. Couple that with CROP, Fellowship, and other means of travel support that involve the payment of a per diem and we are very possibly looking at losses in the 5 digits range for the community.

Solutions for these problems are plentiful and not that complicated. The money can simply be delivered on-site for participants who live in regions that are known to charge extortion fees. I myself have been allowed a stipend three times, and asked for delivery of the stipend on-site all of those three times. The same boilerplate answer was produced by Travel for every request, and this is a direct quote: “According to our records we have already submitted the payment request to our Accounts Payable Department for processing and since our Finance Department has set you up for payment remittance they will want to continue with this method. We are only allocated a specific amount of money for on-site disbursements and are unable to go beyond what is pre-set for the meeting.”

Perhaps ICANN considers it unsafe to travel with a relatively high amount of money, but then again, they could well exercise their clout as a large-scale corporation to have the money processed by banks of the host country and delivered to the treasurer at the meeting’s venue. That would incur in fees and processing challenges, but right now what they are doing is simply outsourcing these challenges to people who do not have the same deep knowledge of the banking system that they have, and therefore have no bargaining power and cannot negotiate better fees or preferential negotiation conditions.

But then again, we are a community that is supposed to be cutting-edge and in touch with technology. The international wiring service TransferWise provides as seamless solution to this problem while generating very little friction to the parties involved. Transfers happen in around two days, at close to ideal market rates, and at their full value in dollars. I am not proposing some sort of groundbreaking innovation either, as ISOC has adopted this as its solution to wiring money to people for whom it offers travel support, as long as the country is already part of TransferWise’s expanding network. As a disclaimer, I am in no way affiliated to this company. I am merely a satisfied consumer.

So, with two very realistic solutions that I know of to the problem, and perhaps several more that I do not know of, I ask of ICANN: why not rely on a method that does not squander our collective money? Why insist on old-fashioned systems that only take money away from the hands of the people who are supposed to be helped by it? This draft cannot move forward without at least a very strong case being made for the maintenance of the current, completely inefficient and uneconomical, system.

Without further ado, I wait for an answer to this question that has been perplexing me over the course of the past 3 years.

Mark W. Datysgeld [www.markwd.website]
2018, June 21