ICANN's Plan
I support ICANN. It's better than the alternative for carrying out its very narrow mission: making sure entries in the root don't conflict, staying on top of changes to the IANA database, and serving as a forum for the creation of consensus policies (within a constrained “picket fence” of topics) for which documented support exists. Although there has been a “if you're not with us, you're against us” embattled feeling in the air where ICANN is concerned, I do think that the ICANN experiment in self-ordering for global names and numbers continues to be worthwhile, and I want it to succeed.
But I do have some concerns about ICANN's recently-released Strategic Plan [pdf]. Complete with UN-style document numbering, it's clearly the product of a great deal of work by the staff and by consultants to ICANN. The only problem is that it's a plan without limiting principles or a clear recognition of ICANN's limited role in the world.
Some specifics:
1. Staff to double over the coming year; budget to continue to rise by leaps and bounds; new gTLDs and .net to provide revenue stream based on .75 per “transaction” (or “billable event”) and slices of new registry services.
2. Regional offices to open around the world; more meetings to happen, including sub-regional meetings; special funds earmarked for developing nations to be gathered and disbursed.
3. ICANN to take a central role with respect to security; multilingual efforts to be substantially increased; better PR for ICANN to be provided.
There's a central tension here. ICANN says, appropriately, that it's not going to handle spam or content issues or anything else. Its job is to make recommendations to the US Department of Commerce concerning what changes should be made in the root zone file, and to maintain the list of IP addresses that the Regional Internet Registries hand out. This is a very very limited job.
The plan set forth in this document, while eminently logically presented, seems far out of proportion to this very limited job, for the following reasons:
a. Most of ICANN's work could be (should be) done online. Why have even more meetings? Why have even more regional presences?
b. By contract, the scope of ICANN's authority to set consensus policies has been sharply limited. This plan contains no recognition of this fact.
c. ICANN has to date made very little progress on items it says it needs more money to accomplish. But the plan provides no milestones for the use of this additional money. For example, although the plan makes clear that root server security is one of ICANN's top priorities, ICANN has never succeeded in making any progress with these operators (and may never do so). Same with formal agreements with ccTLDs. The address space is well taken care of, but that's thanks to the RIRs — not ICANN.
d. ICANN claims credit for tasks it has very little to do with. For example, ICANN points to the successful resolution of billions of name requests. But that's thanks to private operators, not ICANN. And ICANN has nothing whatsoever to do with coordination of technical parameters — it hands that job off to root server operators, the RIRs, and the IETF. To the extent ICANN seeks funding to “continue” these jobs, they can be done for free.
What ICANN does need is support for the volunteers who work on policy development — we'd have a better answer to WIPO II if we had better help. And ICANN does need staff to deal with registry and registrar requests that ICANN finish things it has promised to do. But ICANN doesn't need more meetings, doesn't need regional offices, and doesn't need to generate funds to support work on connectivity and other issues in developing nations. These things don't fit with its very limited mandate.
And ICANN certainly doesn't need money to continue endless work on tasks for which it has – to date — showed no particular aptitude. Particularly where no performance milestones are present to limit its endless appetite for growth. (It's amazing that this flurry of tasks and subtasks isn't linked to a visible docket sheet that people can follow online.)
Here's a question for ICANN. Assume a guaranteed, no-negotiation-necessary budget of $5 million a year. How would you carry out your tasks? I have a feeling that it could be done. It just doesn't take that much work to check entries in the IANA database, allow a new gTLD to open, or allow online work on consensus policies to go forward.
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