Navigating the ICANN way

LET'S SAY YOU WERE TRYING to convince your boss that you should have more money and more responsibility. How would you go about it? One way - the way someone might adopt if they didn't mind being called a "swot" in Britain - might be to do a really good job at the work you were assigned to do, however limited and boring it might be. Then you have something to show your boss as evidence that you're worth paying to move on to something more interesting and complicated. The other way is to partially complete a few tangential tasks and then explain that the job description is all wrong.

It's this latter path that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers ICANNseems to have adopted. This week, current ICANN president Stuart Lynn released a report in which he proposes to completely reform the organization, saying the concept behind it is "impractical", its mission "incredibly ambitious", and its private model "unworkable". Of course, he also describes its policy process as "remarkably open", and the introduction of competition between registrars, the uniform dispute resolution policy, and the creation of seven new top-level domains as "real accomplishments."

Others, of course, see ICANN's record differently. The UDRP has often been criticized as favouring large trademark holders (and celebrities) over grass roots and individuals, especially given who some of the arbitrators are ( WIPO Its policy process has attracted many complaints over ICANN's three-year existence for being closed and unaccountable. As for the seven new top-level domains, have you surfed to a .biz lately? I think I heard for the first time this week of someone actually registering in there because the name he wanted in .co.uk was taken. Meanwhile, the country code domains (ccTLDs) are still complaining that they're being hit up for money but not being offered service level agreements or board representation in return ( WWTLD )

So Lynn's proposal is to reform ICANN by adding 50 percent more staff (going from 20 to 30) and quadrupling the budget from its present $6 million or so. He also wants to revise the organizational structure, revising the various committees and reducing the number of board members, but most significantly by dumping the messy, democratic business of electing at-large board members from the Internet community. Instead, he proposes to add five representatives from governments to represent the public interest.

It's mean and irrelevant - but fun - to compare ICANN's "org chart" to the structure of the organization that preceded it ( here. That comparison, by itself, was enough in the early days to convince people that ICANN was seriously overweight, bureaucratic. But the fact is that ICANN's creation in late 1998 was the result of several years of acrimonious consultation, and Jon Postel, who managed both the domain name system and the assignment of Internet numbers from the time those systems were created, was deeply involved in that process.

The fact that the original Department of Commerce white paper that created ICANN had a great deal of consensus behind it does not, as Michael Froomkin has pointed out here make it sacred. But when an effort is failing it's usually a good idea to go back and look at what it set out to do in the first place.

ICANN's job is supposed to be technical oversight. It is supposed to coordinate the handing out of domain names and Internet numbers and write standards now and then. It doesn't oversee the development of the Internet's technical architecture; we have a slew of alphabet soups for that including the Internet Architecture Board and the Internet Engineering Task Force. Lynn explains elsewhere that the reason for the increased budget is to be able to pay the people who run the root servers. But should ICANN be the root servers' paymaster? Doesn't that make the root server operators employees of ICANN rather than independents?

One of the ways you ensure that an organization doesn't get too big and assume too much power is to have checks and balances on its growth and insidership. Lynn's proposal for ICANN 2.0 removes the elected board members (already reduced from nine to five), allows the board power to appoint itself, and reduces the number of physical meetings per year from four to two. Add in turning the root servers into employees, and ICANN looks like a behemoth in the making.

ICANN has spent much of its three-year history denying that it has any interest in "governing" the Internet. This is a good thing, a) because the Internet's rampant experimentation and consequent success has had a lot to do with its having had very little overall governance, and b) because it's not clear whether the Internet is in fact governable. Some aspects of the Internet - ecommerce, for example - need to be regulated in the same way that their offline counterparts are. Others do not.

In any event, the areas that need regulation do not need it from ICANN. We already have existing offline consumer protection organizations and legal structures for that. ICANN should go back to its roots and do the original job it was mandated to do: technical oversight - and do it well. µ

Previous Columns
Battle of the titans
By any other name Dumber people can run Windows
2001 in review
Care in the community
Remembrance of postings past
BT's Stupid Patent Tricks
Preserving our freedoms
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas
Net is the mother of re-invention
Save the Cookie
Digital rights and the new era of world terrorism

Wendy M. Grossman, whose Web site is pelicancrossing.net, is author of From Anarchy to Power: the Net Comes of Age (NYU Press, 2001), net.wars (NYU Press, 1998), and the Daily Telegraph A-Z Guide to the Internet (Macmillan, 2001). She can be reached at this email address.

Copyright on all articles published in the INQUIRER is hers.