ICANN

ALAC Meets the ICANN Board

For three years, I've been a member of ICANN's "Interim" At-Large Advisory Committee, ALAC. At this Vancouver meeting, for the first time, the ICANN Board met with us, and Bret captured it on mp3 for podcast. ALAC criticized ICANN's proposed settlement with VeriSign, and then spoke about the problems with the current structure for at-large participation. more

VeriSign-ICANN Proposed Settlement Discussed in Vancouver

Unfortunately I cannot be in Vancouver for the conference. I write this from Cape Town, venue of last years fall ICANN. I want to disclose a couple of things upfront. Those who know me will know I am nothing if not strongly independent in my views. However disclosure helps those of a more suspicious mind know my associations and if they choose to, take them into account in interpreting my opinions. ...I am somewhat disappointed by the reaction to the proposed settlement. I feel that most of the discussion fails to take into account the actual conditions under which the settlement has been negotiated. more

Lawsuits Filed Against ICANN-VeriSign Settlement

The new organization called Coalition for ICANN Transparency (CFIT) has filed a lawsuit against ICANN and VeriSign in order to stop implementation of the proposed .com registry agreement. According to its description, "CFIT is a not-for-profit Delaware corporation based in Washington, D.C. CFIT’s supporters include individuals, organizations, institutions and companies who are committed to the core principles on which ICANN, the internet governing body is founded." more

ICANN and Legalities

Bret Fausett points to two lawsuits against VeriSign and ICANN for violating U.S. anti-trust laws. They state the obvious: VeriSign and ICANN made an agreement that is to the large financial benefit of the two corporations and the financial detriment of nearly everyone else. The proposed contract is absurd, but so is ICANN's request that people comment on it before ICANN approves it. Anyone familiar with legal negotiations could see that there is no room for significant negotiation on the part of ICANN. more

The WSIS Deal

There is considerable coverage this morning (or this evening in Tunis) on the last minute WSIS deal struck yesterday. The gist of the coverage rightly reports that the U.S. emerged with the compromise they were looking for as the delegates agreed to retain ICANN and the ultimate U.S. control that comes with it (note that there is a lot in the WSIS statement that may ultimately prove important but that is outside the Internet governance issue including the attention paid to cybercrime, spam, data protection, and e-commerce). This outcome begs the questions -- what happened? And, given the obvious global split leading up to Tunis, what changed to facilitate this deal? more

Five More Years! There Was No “Deal” and WSIS Resolved Nothing

The basic problem posed by WSIS was the role of national governments and national sovereignty in global Internet governance. That conflict remains completely unresolved by the WSIS document. The document's thinking is still based on the fiction that there is a clear divide between "public policy" and the "day to day operation" of the Internet, and assumes that governments should be fully in control of the policy-setting function. Moreover, new organizational arrangements are being put into place which will carry on that debate for another 5 years, at least. The new Internet Governance Forum is a real victory for the civil society actors, but also fails to resolve the basic issue regarding the role of governments and sovereignty. Although called for and virtually created by civil society actors, the language authorizing its creation asks to involve all stakeholders "in their respective roles." In other words, we still don't know whether this Forum will be based on true peer-peer based interactions among governments, business and civil society, or whether it will reserve special policy making functions to governments. more

Questioning the Illusion of Internet Governance

I confess, I don't get it. Much has been written about the apparent desire by the United Nations, spurred by China, Cuba, and other informationally repressive regimes, to "take control of the Internet." Oddly, the concrete focus of this battle -- now the topic of a Senate resolution! -- is a comparatively trivial if basic part of Net architecture: the domain name system. The spotlight on domain name management is largely a combination of historical accident and the unfortunate assignment of country code domains like .uk and .eu, geographically-grounded codes that give the illusion of government outposts and control in cyberspace. more

WSIS and the Splitting of the Root

There's talk that in the battle between the USA and Europe over control of ICANN, which may come to a head at the upcoming World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, people will seriously consider "splitting the root" of DNS. I've written a fair bit about how DNS works and how the true power over how names get looked up actually resides with hundreds of thousands of individual site administrators. However, there is a natural monopoly in the root. All those site admins really have to all do the same thing, or you get a lot of problems, which takes away most of that power. Still, this is an interesting power struggle. more

WSIS Deal: Oversight

The UN Secretary-General has been invited to "convene a new forum for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue." Everyone can see his/her hearts' desires in the WSIS deal: ICANN can believe that it has survived for another day; governments can believe that they will have "an equal role and responsibility for international Internet governance"; and there will be an enormous meeting in Greece by the second quarter of 2006 to start the Internet Governance Forum going. more

Internet Governance: Countdown to Tunis

In a paper entitled "DNS Détente", written in the authors' personal capacities, Tricia Drakes (a former member of the ICANN Board) and Michael D. Palage (a current member of the ICANN board) have attempted to address some of the unresolved issues of the recent Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) 3 session in Geneva as discussions head to the final phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis (Nov 16 to 18, 2005). More specifically, the paper focuses on one of the "fundamental stumbling blocks to the continued evolution of Internet Governance"; The insistence of the United States Government (USG) that it retain its historically exclusive role in connection with authorizing changes to the Root A server, particularly with respect to country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). Shared further is the content of this paper. more

Facing the Facts on Internet Governance

Having just arrived in Tunis for the WSIS, my weekly Law Bytes column (Toronto Star version, freely available version) focuses on the Internet governance issues that are likely to dominate discussions all week. I argue that claims about a "digital Munich" and a U.N. takeover are not helpful to arriving at an appropriate solution (though based on discussions this morning it does not appear that things are moving very far away from such claims). more

ICANN Does Something Technical!

I've often said that ICANN regulates the business of buying and selling of domain names and that ICANN's claim that it coordinates technical matters to preserve the stability of DNS is a fantasy. Well I am proven wrong. ICANN has done something technical. ICANN has issued Guidelines for the Implementation of Internationalized Domain Names, Draft Version 2 [PDF] (pending approval by the ICANN board.) It's only four pages long, but those few pages contain a lot of significant material. more

You Paid to Join; You Can Leave Anytime

Once upon a time, around 1998-1999, three of us were hired by APEC-Tel to study "International Charging Arrangements for Internet Services". APEC-Tel is a regular meeting of Pacific-nation telecommunications ministers. The impetus of the study was their consternation that connection to the Internet was being charged (paid for) in an entirely new way. The template of the old telephone settlement scheme had been overthrown. Those wishing to connect to the Internet, which was centred in the United States, were being forced to lay lines across the Pacific, pay landing rights in the United States or Canada, and pay further to connect to the Internet at the nearest negotiated peering or transit point. more

Nom-Com Appoints Independent and Diverse Candidates to ICANN Leadership Positions

When 72 candidates vie for 8 positions, making tough choices are inevitable. ICANN's 2005 Nominating Committee (Nom-Com) on Friday announced the selection of a diverse and independent set of nominees for important roles in ICANN, including the Board of Directors, the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), the At-Large Advisory Council (ALAC) and the Country Code Names Supporting Organization (ccNSO). more

ICANN’s Proposed Changes to IDN Registration

A month ago, ICANN announced that it had a large set of proposed changes to its "Guidelines for the Implementation of Internationalized Domain Names". The original guidelines are fairly confusing and not widely deployed by the ccTLDs, so one would think that the proposed revisions would be clearer and more useful. No such luck. Instead of describing what the problems with the old guidelines were, the committee that put together the new proposal simply added a whole bunch more rules. more