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Checking the Box and Checking Out
Tue, 10/06/2009 - 15:17 — Phil Lodico — PermalinkAfter ICANN and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) signed the Affirmation of Commitments (AOC), Rep. Henry A. Waxman, Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and Rep. Rick Boucher, Chairman of the Communications, Technology, and the Internet Subcommittee spoke out in support of the agreement. Rep. Boucher praised the AOC’s ability to ensure accountability and transparency within ICANN.
Back in June, Rep. Boucher’s committee held a hearing at which the then-CEO of ICANN, Paul Twomey, testified. A pressing issue at that time was the amount of accountability ICANN had, not only to the government but to all of its shareholders. There was a consensus among committee members that ICANN needed to be more transparent in its processes and more accountable to the general public. Later this summer, in August, Rep. Boucher and Rep. Waxman, along with other members of the Energy and Commerce Committee, wrote a letter to Secretary Gary Locke of the DOC calling for an extension of the Joint Project Agreement (JPA) in some form, as well as permanent ties between ICANN and the U.S. government.
So it would appear that the mission has been accomplished. ICANN and the U.S. government are now linked through the new AOC. There’s just one problem – the AOC doesn’t provide the level of accountability that these Congressmen have called for, never mind the level ICANN needs as an organization. The AOC creates a number of panels that will periodically review ICANN, and the U.S. government only holds a seat on one of them. Yes, it is a positive thing that ICANN is still tied to the U.S. government through this agreement, but ICANN is no more accountable than it was under the JPA.
In reality, the AOC simply does not include the accountability mechanisms that they had been pushing for. It is unlikely that this agreement will solve the problems that have existed within ICANN, and there is a chance that those problems will actually get worse. ICANN cannot fall off Congress’s radar, because there is still work to be done. I hope the AOC is not just a way to check the ICANN issue off their list and check out of the matter without doing more of the important work that needs to be done.
ARE YOU LISTENING, ICANN?
Thu, 05/21/2009 - 09:26 — Phil Lodico — PermalinkICANN claims that the roll out of new TLDs is designed to encourage healthy competition in the domain name space, but the organization has repeatedly failed to provide evidence that substantiates these claims. Furthermore, ICANN has not put forth any evidence to suggest that the new TLDs will be even somewhat beneficial to the wide Internet community. I regularly work on these issues and have read countless documents and letters pertaining to the TLD launch. There are two documents from a few months back that are of particular interest. The first is a letter from the Department of Commerce to Peter Dengate-Thrush, the chairman of ICANN’s Board of Directors. The second is a letter from the Department of Justice to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). Both letters provide a laundry list of areas where ICANN needs improvement, better foresight, and an overall reality check.
The DOC’s letter states that while they acknowledge “the effort and hard work involved in producing the documents currently out for comment, it is unclear that the threshold question of whether the potential consumer benefits outweigh the potential costs has been adequately addressed and determined.” One of their recommendations is that ICANN must “ensure that the introduction of a potentially large number of gTLDs, including internationalized top level domains, will not jeopardize the stability and security of DNS.” Given the rampant cybersquatting that occurs among the current TLDs, and the amount on .com alone, I don’t know how ICANN will justify introducing even more TLDs without first addressing the existing problems.
Then there’s the issue of competition. The letter from the DOJ points out that the overwhelming popularity of .com is far too valuable to ever actually be constrained by new TLDs. Even in the current system, most domain owners register other TLDs in order to augment their Internet presence, not as a substitute for a .com name. Both letters implore ICANN to reevaluate the demand for new gTLDs and to better account for the interests of consumers. The brand owners and individuals who register domain names are, in this case, the consumer. Yet ICANN seems to be moving full steam ahead toward this initiative. If ICANN is not listening to consumers or to the government that acts as its advisor, who is ICANN actually listening to? With the DOC joint project agreement scheduled to terminate this September, what is the likelihood that ICANN will be listening to anyone in the future?
