ICANN Wants To End Commerce Dept. Oversight In 2009

Ian Lamont writes "ICANN's current Joint Project Agreement with the US Commerce Department is set to expire in September of 2009, and ICANN wants to become more autonomous and switch to a global governance model, says ICANN's executive officer. The agreement between the nonprofit ICANN and the Commerce Department has been in place since 1998, and was renewed in 2006 despite international protests. A few US-based groups named in the article — including the Center for Democracy and Technology, the trade group TechNet and a conservative think tank iGrowthGlobal — would like the agreement with the Commerce Department to continue, in part to provide 'accountability.' The ICANN officer quoted in the article says expiration of the Commerce Department agreement would not remove accountability, as ICANN still has a contract with the US to operate the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority and must follow California law governing nonprofits. The Register is running a related story about why some people are uncomfortable with the United States' influence on ICANN. We discussed ICANN's request for independence a few months ago."

Comments

who cares

[jgarra23]

The Register is running a related story about why some people are uncomfortable with the United States' influence on ICANN.

Thanks to the US and the DoD we HAVE an internet. As long as the ICANN is located in America they will have to run as a non-profit. Simply put, they're not going to get an exemption just because they think they're some international entity which they really aren't. Come on, get real.

Re:who cares

[palegray.net]

No, that's part of the reason America maintains a massive influence in the world. Carrier battle groups don't hurt either.

Let me get this straight.

[palegray.net]

They want to get out from under the frightfully little real oversight they have now (with a regulating body that at least has a lot of experience in dealing with them) and they want to exert significant influence over the decision process of what body gets to "regulate" them next? That sure sounds like a great idea... for them.

Hm

[youthoftoday]

In capitalist America the Commerce controls the Internet.

Re:Hm

[akuykenda]

In communist Commerce the Internet controls America.

Accountability

[Toonol]

The trouble is that there is no way for ICANN to avoid the oversight of some nation... or nations, in the case of the UN. There will always be some sort of accountability to some governing body. Although the United States may be known to screw up from time-to-time (no, really, sometimes they do), I think the free speech laws in the US are as strong as anywhere in the world, and I have far more confidence that right will continue under the US than that it will under the UN.

Re:Accountability

[moderatorrater]

I have no doubt that the UN will continue to voice support for the idea of free speech. The problem is that the UN lacks an army of its own and the will to enforce its own edicts, probably because there are so many nations with so many conflicting interests with so many ways for a single nation to gum up the works. The UN lacks the power and the conviction to actually support what it says it believes in; the US, if anything, is over eager in those areas.

Re:Accountability

[mordors9]

Ah yes the UN. Wonder what nations they will put on the committee to oversee this area, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran... Maybe the same group they put on the Human Rights Committee a few years back, Syria, Lybia, etc. Yeah, this will work really well.

Re:Accountability

[hey!]

The problem is that the UN lacks an army of its own and the will to enforce its own edicts, probably because there are so many nations with so many conflicting interests with so many ways for a single nation to gum up the works.

Which of course is entirely intentional. The League of Nations failed miserably at averting war, of course. The UN embodies the lessons of the League of Nations which is -- don't bother trying.

If the UN were about ending war, it'd have to be a world government with an army. But it's not. It just reduces the number, size and scope of wars, and by trying less hard, it succeeds more often.

The way the UN does this is by ratifying the imposition of the strong upon the weak, which is going to happen anyway. Thats why there are permanent security council members with a veto. Say you are superpower and you want some small country to do something or else. If you really want to do it, the security council can't stop you, because you've got a veto. But the other countries on the security council will be pissed at you, and you want things from them like having them lower barriers to your country's goods, or their support on some treaty or another. So you think twice about whether it's really worth your while. If you're smart that is. If you're really incredibly stupid, you believe your own rhetoric about how the UN is encroaching on your Liebensraum, which means you end up shooting yourself in the foot.

Contrarywise, lets say the rest of the security council is cool with your invading the little country to get what you want from them. Its like Koko says in the Mikado; it's all over for them, and the actual execution is a mere formality that, on balance, everybody would rather forgo.

An organization like the UN is exactly what is wanted here. But not the UN. It's too much of a political punching bag already. So you make another international organization that pretty much runs the same way: it appears to be for fairness, but really it just slows down rash actions enough so they can be reconsidered in terms of enlightened self interest.

Re:Accountability

[religious freak]

Wow, well said! One of the best quotes I've heard re the UN:

The UN was not designed to deliver us to paradise - rather to save us from hell.

I think that is a perfect description of what the UN does.

Re:Accountability

[hey!]

It's not 100% successful of course, but it really is marvelous that an institution designed so cynically can aid the cause of humanity so effectively.

Just goes to show the world needs its cynics too. It may need them more even more than it needs its idealists.

Re:Accountability

[rtb61]

All too complicated. It would be far simple to completely break up ICANN and simply replace it with mirrored domains and cooperative treaties between nations. ICANN is completely unnecessary it really is a pointless waste sucking up money and seems to be do into doing nothing more than creating a cloak of non-profitability, whilst those wholesaling the services gain control of it and seek monopoly driven unlimited profit.

There is absolute no reason each country can create their own core domain and then simply based upon treaties with other countries mirror which ever registered names they choose, where another country abuses the system, the simply override the mirror with their own names/IP entries.

If the internet balkanises it makes it more expensive for business so they will seek to keep the system under control, of course for business it again is showing signs of becoming expensive with one centralised group having total control. So a brohen up and distributed between nations ICANN makes more sense, no UN required at all, just a system of database mirrors and treaties.

Re:Accountability

[Crazy Taco]

No, the problem isn't that the UN doesn't have an army. The problem is that they are quite possibly the most corrupt organization the world has ever seen, and I'm sure there are a lot of countries (cough Iran Cuba China cough) that would just love to have ICANN be governed by people who love to take bribes.

If ICANN is released, who will control it?

[karl.auerbach]

ICANN is already costing you and me - the people who buy domain names - something on the order of $500,000,000 every year in hyper-inflated fees that go directly into the bank account Verisign and the lesser registries. ICANN also requires you and me to path a tithe of about $0.20 to ICANN every time we register a domain name.

And ICANN has created a regime that restricts DNS on behalf of the trademark industry in ways that RIAA can only envy and wish they had such restrictions over music distribution on the net.

And despite that, ICANN has no means for the public to engage in its decision processes beyond remotely observing and trying joining an ICANN approved committee that, in turn joins another ICANN approved committee, that, in turn gets a seat on another ICANN committee, that gets to nominate members of the board of directors. Even citizens of the old USSR had a more representative system.

Once upon a time ICANN did have directors elected by the public - I was the one for North America - but when I wanted to look at ICANN's financial records, a thing quite proper for a director to do, ICANN reacted by erasing all elected seats.

So, if the US government drops its oversight, limited and self-interested as it might be, where will oversight come from?

Do we really trust that ICANN will be any more self-responsive to the community of internet users than was Enron or MCI/Worldcom to their shareholders?

It does seem that the quid pro quo that the US ought to require as the price of freedom is that ICANN adopt mechanisms that really and truly make it responsible to the public.

There is, of course, the further question of where ICANN might obtain immunity against anti-trust laws should the US gov't drop its protective cloak - ICANN does shape the domain name marketplace, set prices and product terms, determine who may and who may not be vendors in that marketplace, and in other ways restrains trade in the world's only viable marketplace of domain names. Several experts in the field feel that ICANN may be vulnerable as a combination that acts in restraint of trade.

Re:If ICANN is released, who will control it?

[karl.auerbach]

We are entering an "interesting" era in which the authority and power once held nearly exclusively by national governments is eroding, due to the internet and multi-national corporations, and flowing into the hands of privary bodies such as ICANN.

There have been private bodies that have become legitimatized and have demonstrated that they can be trusted with authority - the Red Cross comes to mind as one example. (It's now a body that has treaties behind it, but that was parallel to the growth of its legitimacy.)

We need to reach back to the late 17th and early 18th centuries to re-learn the lessons - from folks like Voltare and Madison - about how to structure bodies so that they have internal tensions (think the three branches of the US gov't) and other mechanisms (such as a constitution that enumerates powers and limits) so constrain improper use of the power that a body has.

How this is done in specific terms is the issue of internet governance today. But unfortunately the "stakeholders" (such as the intellectual property protection industry) are well organized and tend to trump the less organized, and less able to afford to attend, members of the public.

This isn't easy stuff.

What oversight?

[damn_registrars]

From my vantage point, I'd say that ICANN is failing miserably at its main purpose - regulation of domain name registration. Can anyone think of anything else that ICANN (allegedly) has even the slightest influence on?

I say they are failing miserably at this because they aren't actually demonstrating any meaningful control. If you look at the list of accredited registrars, you'll find it is many pages long. And how many of those are active registrars? Not many.

And even worse, the number of active registrars on that list that actively aid in spamming operations grows every year, and ICANN doesn't seem to care in the least. If ICANN is supposed to be in control of registration, why are they letting criminal co-conspirators do registration?

I am so sick and tired of this attitude

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus H Christ, shut up with the "BUT AMERICA INVENTED THE INTERNET LOL" bullshit. Yeah, TCP/IP was developed in America. We all know that. Thanks to the DOD's investment, progress was brought ahead a few years.

So, DNS? Well, America formerly, not any more, had an unimpeachable reputation as a free, reasonable country. I guess the rest of the world trusted the USA to responsibly steward such an important system, so everyone used that. Again, not any more.

For many reasons, including but not limited to size, wealth and attractiveness to smart people the world over as a place to work, America was and to some extent still is the centre of the world in computing technology. But an awful lot of that comes from the rest of the world's trust in America - not just as a reliable manager of the infrastructure we all rely on, but also as a great place to live and work. How much longer will this be the case? In the latter case, it's debatable it's true any more even today. 10 years ago I knew a lot of people who wanted to move to the US. Today, I don't know anyone who wants to.

We are all grateful to the US for its early work and continuing effort to develop technology. But these increasingly surly attempts to hold onto what should be internationally controlled systems do the US no favours. Remember, despite its size, America is less than 5% of the world's population. It wouldn't be all that hard for other governments to mandate their ISPs to start serving DNS from somewhere else - I'd wager 99% of DNS requests are made through ISPs. If abuses of their power like the cuba website case continue, I am sure other governments will start to feel a little anxious about critical infrastructure they rely upon being in the hands of unreliable people.

Just please stop with the boosterism and "us vs. them" attitude. The world will be a better place if we all cooperate. And if America continues to hoard - and abuse - its 40-year-old "steward of DNS" privileges, the other 95% of the world might be provoked into action, to the detriment of all - including the US.