> ICANN, Dotted With Doubts
> Role as Domain-Name Manager In Danger as Criticism Grows
>
> 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.
>
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