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.

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

[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.