Someone Must Be In Charge
The Names Council met last week and will be meeting again next week to discuss a PDP for how ICANN should react to registry “proposals” (the new buzzword — an attempt to ensure that actions that do not necessarily add up to the introduction of a new “Registry Service” will nevertheless be subject to ICANN approval).
Midway through last week's call (here's a link for listening), at about 1:09, Christopher Wilkinson cleared his throat and balefully said the following (paraphrasing — listen to the call to get the exact text):
My main point is to encourage the GNSO Council to avoid ideological terminology. We are dealing with a situation currently where many governments need to know where regulatory authority over the Internet lies. Currently it lies in the ICANN/GAC public/private partnership. It is not productive to the present debate to deny that ICANN holds regulatory power. It has to be there somewhere. It’s through ICANN that the Council is acting. [A registry representative had said that ICANN is not a regulator.] . . . . It is not helpful to tell the world that ICANN has no regulatory authority. If that’s the message from the private sector, then many governments will say that the existing public/private partnership is not enough.
This is an important moment, and we should pay attention to Mr. Wilkinson's message. His point is that someone must be in charge. Someone must hold the reins; someone must be telling the registries what to do, even if their contracts with ICANN don't require any prior permission in order to act. Regulatory power has to be there somewhere, Mr. Wilkinson is saying. And if ICANN doesn't show that it has this power, governments will Have To Step In.
This is in the context of the assertion by ICANN staff (listen to the call carefully) that it is not appropriate to allow registries to act without permission.
What's remarkable about this moment is that the hot potato of DNS standard-setting is still up in the air. The US government didn't want to appear to be in charge, and wanted to convince European governments that it wasn't in charge, and so it created (or called for the creation of) ICANN. ICANN was designed to keep other governments at bay. ICANN has, however, no particular delegated power beyond that accorded to it by the contracts it has signed with registries and registrars. In fact, it can't have more power than that, because if it pretends to be a regulatory agency it should be complying with the APA — and if it pretends to be a regulator its private nature probably violates US law in a number of respects. Right now, though, it needs to pretend to be a regulator just enough to keep other governments happy (according to Mr. Wilkinson). But it's in a bind: it really isn't a regulator, and there's no reason for registries to agree to have their every “significant” (whatever that means) action approved by ICANN.
Mr. Wilkinson's sentiment — regulatory power must be there somewhere — also points to another sharp distinction that isn't being understood at the moment: At the moment, no one governs the Internet. ICANN isn't about Internet governance (whatever that means). ICANN worries about registries and number allocation. That's it. If the world wants to make rules about content and identity and intellectual property and cybercrime, the world will have to find another vessel. ICANN cannot bear that burden.
Comments
5 Responses to “Someone Must Be In Charge”
Got something to say?
Good stuff. You should post a link to BWG.
Bret
Don't tell the governments that no one is “in charge” of making sure there is enough food in New York every day!
Don't tell ICANN that no one has to approve in advance the many decisions that have an impact on that vital result!
As you know, the appropriate response to Christopher Wilkinson is that, of course, governments are in charge — and they should spend their time trying to figure out how to regulate spam or other clear wrongdoing. The absence of a “government” at the top of a world-wide command and control hierarchy is no reason to eliminate systems that produce order from the bottom up. Indeed, the impossibility of creating a single global authority that could possibly regulate the net (without killing it), is the main reason to protect decentralized decision-making with respect to policies followed by the many networks that interconnect to form the net in the first place.
I don't know if you've been watching the “discussion” going on right now on the IETF mailing list - the thread begins about here.
In that discussion, and one has to remember the audience, ICANN's Chairman and a few others are trying to dispell the notion that ICANN is obligated under its MoU to exert more than friendly, non-binding suggestion in the direction of the DNS root server operators and IP address registries.
ICANN is dancing as fast as it can to try to tell governments and businesses that ICANN “ensures” the stability of not merely DNS registries/registrars but also of IP address allocations and root server operations. At the same time ICANN is dancing as fast as it can to reassure the root server operators and IP address registries that they are independent of ICANN and that ICANN possesses no power to impose requirements or policies upon them.
Those two positions are more than simply inconsistent; they are direct contradictions.
ICANN's board should adopt a resolution declaring clearly and without equivocation whether ICANN believes its bylaws and the MoU obligate it to be in control of DNS root server operation and IP address allocation or whether ICANN considers itself nothing more than a mere kibitzer in these matters.
The New York Times has published an article entitled “Nations Chafe at U.S. Influence Over the Internet” in which they indicate that other countries are unhappy with the influence the US has over Internet governance. It first states that the UN appears anxious to take over this job, but by the end of the article softens up on the idea — “It is not broken, so why fix it?”
Some interesting quotes from the article:
“By 2007, though, more than 50 percent of Web users will be Chinese, according to some forecasts.”
“The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, still has more Internet addresses than all of China…”
So much for a UN takeover. That was quick.