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Froomkin Examines ICANN Legitimacy
cygnusx writes: "First saw this in the TBTF blog: an excellent 2-part article on the legal legitimacy of ICANN itself. You can read the (PDF) drafts: part 1 and part 2. The article (being a draft) forbids quoting without permission, but the essential argument is that the U.S. government has acted irresponsibly in exercising federal power, whether ICANN is an independent entity or not. Incidentally, Part 1 contains one of the best for-laymen introductions to the DNS I have read so far." Professor Froomkin is an occasional Slashdot contributor who has kept a closer eye on ICANN than ICANN would have preferred. This is an excellent paper for anyone who cares about how the Internet is and will be governed. Update: 10/13 5:58 PM by michael : Only the first link works; it contains the entire paper.
The Constitution was not designed to handle cases like the Internet. The Internet is a global entity, but invented in the US, and dominated by us as well. It exists on a cooperative basis (the Internet is merely a huge aggregation of computers and gateways running TCP/IP), but numbering and naming do need to be administered centrally, so cooperation isn't replaced by anarchy.
The problem was that it all worked fine when Jon Postel was the benevolent dictator in charge of the system - he was relatively unbiased and had the technical credentials and experience (he was there at the beginning) that were needed to give him credibility. His death left a huge void, in more ways than one. ICANN is a "best effort" by the US government (who paid for this all in the beginning, lest we forget) to replace him with an organization with some degree of legitimacy and credibility - the benevolent dictator model was broken with Jon's loss.
Given all that, ICANN is a reasonable compromise. Other parts of the world get a voice for the first time on Internet governance, numbers are assigned in normal fashion, DNS is still a little screwy but at least NSI doesn't have a total monopoly anymore, and things keep running as always. Do some aspects of ICANN suck? Absolutely. They are way too biased towards business in domian name disputes, Esther Dyson isn't that skilled a leader (to be fair, it was kind of thrust upon her), and the whole organization, being global in scope, is falling victim to "UN-itis" - a whole batch of bureaucrats travel over the globe and eat expensive meals while doing very little.
But overall, before slamming ICANN to the mat, think about the alternatives and if there's really a better solution, short of putting the US government back in charge. Governing a mutant entity like the Internet is a tough job, but someone has to do it. ICANN needs some fixes, but I think they're the best suited to the job. Screw the APA. The only APA that I worry about is the one with Bradshaw and Farooq.
And unfortunately, we don't have the option of putting Postel back in charge - the "Weekend at Bernie's" model of governance just doesn't work in practice.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
RealNames was, of course, an attempt to do this. But handing keywords from a messy standards body to a single corporation with a non-federated protocol is clearly not the answer.
What we need to do is build more robust clients for name resolution that can integrate information from a variety of sources. Clients that take into account individual user's preferences, as well as context (e.g., host names inside web pages should usually refer to the ICANN-administered world).
I've been a slashdot reader for quite a while. So no need to do this in the third person. (I wish they'd contacted me before slashdotting our server...I could also have told them the documents had moved.) The current online draft is being checked over to remove a very large number of spelling and formatting errors, and what I hope is a very small number of sourcing errors. A final version should be online some time next week for your quoting pleasure. Meanwhile, all 169 pages of the draft are now in one handy file. I intend to produce an HTML version in due course, but because the law review publishing this uses MS Word, which I don't use often, I have to find an easy way to convert the footnotes in a readable manner. Suggestions welcome.
Of the comments made so far, just two replies:
I have a blog.
What I get when trying http://personal.law. mia mi.edu/~froomkin/articles/icann1.pdf:
That seems pretty effective to me.
--
Turn on, log in, burn out...
The technical decisions have non-technical consequences when the system expands exponentially in relevance, scope, and power. Although ICANN is probably not perceived as being as important as the FCC at this point, the time will come when it is perceived as MORE important than the FCC. Certainly as Froomkin recognizes, a body that is making decisions about people's substantive rights will have come into being and developed ways of handling those decisions without any guidance, delegation or even consideration by Congress.
Rather than nationalize the problems, the tendency has been to try to internationalize them so that the technical nightmare of root getting split is never raised by the need of the rest of the world to not be dominated by the US. Of course, this internationalization is not supervised by our government, or any that I can tell.
A lot worse could happen than the US Government continuing to ignore the situation. There is a reason that the Internet defeated Microsoft's initial business model executed as a closed network. I can't see how anything the government would do that would be more formal would do anything except choke the net in red tape.
OK, so the author asserts ICANN is on shaky ground legally. What can we do about it? Who do we sue? Who do we lean upon?
I'd be thrilled if there were something I could be doing about this, but what?
-- He's fantastic, made of plastic....
while having a centralized power for assigning names and numbers helps the internet from fragmenting into proprietary networks, i think that we could come up with a better way of running this. i don't want the people running the ICANN to have any political agenda. I just want them to keep things running smoothly. Taco wants his .dot (presumably for slashdot.dot/slash/) so why do we have to wait for these people to approve it? what it think the icann should be doing is giving out TLD's to organizations who apply for them (say Taco were to send in a request for control of ".dot" stating why ".dot" would be a necessary addition, or different than .com or any other TLD's, and what his intended use of the TLD is, who he's going to let use it, etc.) And then, people looking for a domain could then register through the TLD owner (if i wanted dotdotdot.dot, i'd have to go through taco) and all the ICANN's job would be is making sure that people stuck to their intended uses of their TLD's, and read peoples requests for control over TLD's. This way, there'd still be a centralized standard system, but it'd allow for more domains, and less power in the hands of ICANN, who seemingly has a political agenda. it would force a system of checks and balances, which i don't see today.
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
Adobe has an online tool for converting pdf files to html. Just put in the pdfs' URLs, and hurry before they get slashdotted.
-- Anne Marie