ICANN and the DOC
ICANN today issued a press release and a series of documents about its relationship with the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Speaking only for myself, and not on behalf of ICANN, I want to make three points:
1. ICANN is no longer bound by the specific set of milestones that were in its prior MoU with DOC. With this freedom comes great responsibility. Without detailed government oversight, and without market competition for policymaking for domain names, ICANN (and the ICANN Board) has a great obligation to be accountable to its community.
2. We have a very long way to go in creating adequate accountability and transparency mechanisms for policymaking for gTLDs, as a recent London School of Economics report demonstrated. And this is only one aspect of ICANN's operations that needs improvement — we still haven't figured out a rational way to involve individuals and we still don't have a rational process for adding new gTLDs. ICANN has to continue to change for the better, and we have a lot of mileage to cover in this respect.
3. The Preliminary Report of the recent Board meeting (here) reflects that the Board adopted the new agreement with the DoC. It does not record the statements that were made by Board members, including me, at the time of that meeting — these must be coming later in the minutes, which will need to be approved by the Board. I was deeply concerned about the agreement's apparent wholesale ratification of the DOC's desire to retain the current WHOIS policy. It would be completely inappropriate to bind ourselves contractually to that policy in advance in order to satisfy the USG, particularly when members of the ICANN community have devoted tens of thousands of hours to discussing possible changes to that policy.
To me, personally, it doesn't make sense to require public display of private information as a condition of registering a domain name.
I have been assured, again and again, that ICANN's own current PDP processes are not undermined by this agreement, and that should a changed WHOIS policy be adopted by the Board it can be enforced without the DOC's agreement. That was certainly the understanding I had in agreeing to adoption of this new agreement with the Department of Commerce.
All comments more than welcome.