By David McGuire washingtonpost.com Thursday, June 20, 2002; Page E06
Questions about who should control the Internet's complex global addressing system are mounting as the current governing body weighs whether to do away with plans for international elections.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a 19-member international standards-setting body that operates under the auspices of the U.S. government, manages the address system.
ICANN makes decisions about who may distribute Internet addresses, how much domain names cost, and what addressing suffixes (.com, .net, .org, .biz, .info and others) are added to and removed from the system.
But while ICANN continues to make those decisions, it faces criticism from public interest advocates and members of Congress who complain the group has enacted too many key policies by fiat and has failed to includeenough ordinary Internet users in its decision-making.
As an example, many critics cite that ICANN once gave companies that were proposing new domain suffixes just three minutes each during a hearing to defend their ideas before the board made its choices, which were not subject to appeal.
The Commerce Department, which oversees ICANN, plans to decide in September whether to renew the agreement under which ICANN manages the domain-name system.
"Barring significant changes, we'll have to look at alternatives to ICANN," said Rep. John M. Shimkus (R-Ill.), a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Another Commerce Committee member, Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), was more blunt. "Although ICANN is supposed to be a consensus-based organization, the irony is that the only thing it has achieved global consensus on is that it is a failure."
Few dispute that ICANN needs major repairs. ICANN President M. Stuart Lynn said as much earlier this year.
Just weeks before ICANN was scheduled to vote on a proposal that would have allowed Internet users to elect several members of ICANN's board of directors, Lynn proposed that ICANN scrap elections altogether in favor of developing a faster-acting decision-making body.
Lynn has proposed a structure under which an internally selected nominating committee would choose much of ICANN's board. That nominating committee would be charged with ensuring that all its nominees were committed to upholding the public interest, Lynn said. ICANN is scheduled to vote on the proposal at a meeting in Bucharest, Romania, later this month.
Most of ICANN's 19 board members were appointed to their posts through an internal nomination process. ICANN staged global elections over the Internet in 2000, seating five members. But Lynn worries such elections are too easy to corrupt by special interest groups attempting to capture board seats. And he said too much public process can hamper ICANN's ability to act expeditiously.
"Public participation is a broad and undefined term," Lynn said. "The reason why we are a private organization is that government organizations -- by their very nature -- tend to be deliberative and take a very long time to make decisions, whereas ICANN needs to be agile and effective."
Some public interest groups has become so exasperated with ICANN's stance on public involvement that they are calling on the Commerce Department to force ICANN to compete for the right to operate the domain-name system.
"Requiring ICANN to compete against qualified bidders will provide a strong incentive for ICANN to engage in a thorough housecleaning and become more genuinely responsive to the comments of stakeholders," the groups wrote in a letter addressed to Nancy Victory, chief of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the Commerce Department agency that directly oversees ICANN.
The American Civil Liberties Union, Consumers Union, the Consumer Federation of America, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Electronic Frontier Foundation all signed the letter, which was organized by the Washington-based Media Access Project.
The groups argued that ICANN has repeatedly refused to give the international public any meaningful role in Internet governance.
Testifying before a Senate Commerce Committee subcommittee earlier this month, Victory acknowledged many of the criticisms leveled at ICANN, but recommended that ICANN be given the opportunity to initiate its own reforms. She said the September deadline for renewing ICANN's agreements would be a good time to gauge whether the organization is moving quickly and in the right direction toward meaningful change.
Questioning the Process ICANN was formed in 1998 as an alternative to U.S. hegemony over the Internet. Until then, the Commerce Department directly managed the system.
Although incorporated in Marina Del Ray, Calif., ICANN convened an international board of directors intended to represent Internet "stakeholders" from around the world. But it has long wrestled with the question of how to get a broader cross-section of Internet users involved in decision-making -- a key tenet of the entity's agreement with the government.
Congress started taking a closer look at ICANN in 2001 after the organization approved seven new Internet domains designed to boost competition and ease crowding in the .com, .net and .org domains.
Responding to an ICANN request for proposals, nearly 50 organizations and companies from around the world plunked down nonrefundable fees of $50,000 each, as they submitted bids to operate new domains.
When ICANN rejected most of those proposals, several losing bidders took issue with the process ICANN used to select new suffixes. Those complaints sparked a contentious congressional hearing in February 2001.
At that hearing Markey questioned ICANN Chairman Vinton G. Cerf on the criteria that the ICANN board used to choose the seven winning bids. Markey said he was particularly concerned by the absence of an appeal process for losing bidders.
"It was a very arbitrary process with no appeals and ultimately it's the antithesis of what the Internet is supposed to be, which is a democratizing influence on the world," Markey said.
Some say the United States should tread carefully in trying to force change, lest it provoke a backlash from the rest of the world.
"The expectation is that ICANN is a global organization with equal input," Theresa Swinehart, ICANN's counsel for international legal affairs said. If the U.S. government throws its weight around too much, important international ICANN participants could defect from the process, she said.
For his part, Lynn said ICANN's critics focus too much on the way ICANN does things and not enough on what ICANN does.
"They're interested in process, not in substance," Lynn said. If ICANN moves in the direction of expanding and lengthening its processes, rather than streamlining them, "we may as well be a government organization," Lynn said.