[governance] ICANN’s New US Contract And New Top Level Domains - It’s Not Over
Dr. Francis MUGUET
muguet at mdpi.net
Wed Sep 30 17:41:45 EDT 2009
Just coming back home, after a few hectic days
FYI, an interesting analysis
http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/2009/09/29/icanns-new-us-contract-and-new-top-level-domains-its-not-over/
*29 September 2009*
ICANN’s New US Contract And New Top Level Domains - It’s Not Over
By Monika Ermert <http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/author/monika/> for
/Intellectual Property Watch/ @ 12:07 pm
With a day to go before the joint project agreement between the Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the United States
Department of Commerce (DoC) is set to expire, calls for continuous US
oversight role have been reiterated by US politicians and private-sector
representatives who reason that this oversight is especially needed in
the face of the planned introduction of new internet top-level domains
like .shop.
ICANN is a “captured regulator,” the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse
(CADNA) warned last Wednesday and asked for additional oversight by the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS), as ICANN is “risking
cybersecurity, national security and global security.” Yet The Economist
magazine ran an opinionated story only a day later asserting that ICANN
would be “independent,” under the new contract conceding that the core
infrastructure managed by ICANN - the domain-name system (DNS) root zone
- will still be controlled by US authorities.
So it’s not over, neither the disputes about new top-level domains
(TLDs) nor those about further internationalising internet domain name
system oversight.
ICANN was founded in 1998 to organise private-sector, bottom-up and
multi-stakeholder management for the coordination of the DNS and also IP
addresses and so-called protocol parameters. It has since been at the
centre of a heated debate about the roles of the US, but also global
governments, industry and civil society groups in internet governance.
Broadsides at ICANN
While it had been quiet about the deadline of its joint project
agreement (JPA) over the last month, last week ICANN saw some broadsides
fired at its TLD expansion plans and its work record in general that
would have been suitable for lobbying by US companies and trademark
owners seeking to preserve US control. ICANN is “not independent,” “not
transparent” nor “accessible,” is only after its own profits and is
risking the stability and security of the internet it is tasked to
protect, wrote CADNA, that lists companies like Verizon, HP, Dell, but
also non-telecommunications, non-information technology members like
Goldman Sachs or Wells Fargo, Nike or Hilton Hotels. CADNA called for a
“full-scale audit of ICANN.”
The group requested that a special federal commission take up to twelve
months “to fully audit ICANN and develop recommendations for a revised
and updated JPA.” The introduction of new TLDs also came under fire from
CADNA who dismissed the roll-out as “poorly conceived.”
Steve DelBianco, chairman of the Net Choice Coalition, representing
companies like VeriSign and eBay, complained at a 23 September hearing
of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Competition Policy
that ICANN had “got sidetracked” in the process of introducing new TLDs.
“ICANN should refocus on international labels [domains],” DelBianco
said. Countries like China have long asked for internationalised,
non-Latin domain names at the highest level. By opening up the TLD
expansion to every new Latin-script string and complicating and slowing
the process instead ICANN has risked the “splintering of the single root
system,” he said, because “China has got tired of label makers and made
a mini-ICANN of their own sitting on top of ours.” DelBianco neglected
to mention that his parallel proposal to allocate the Chinese versions
of .com, .net to the registries managing the English versions like
VeriSign likely would not amuse the respective countries.
DelBianco, joined by Richard Heath, president of the International
Trademark Association argued, that new generic TLDs in English would not
bring innovation. Heath said it would instead “decrease competition if
we (the trademark owners) have to fund a lot more defensive
registration“ and this would also divert resources from innovation and
from investment in corporate social sponsorship projects.
Congressional Members: New TLDs Require Oversight of ICANN
Several members of Congress seemed to agree with the two trademark right
representatives. Chairman Hank Johnson (Democrat, Georgia) for example
said: “I do not understand [why] they want an unlimited expansion of the
name space.“ Johnson acknowledged non-Latin TLDs and initiatives like
.nyc and .eco have merit. Given the planned expansion, US oversight over
ICANN’s process continued to be necessary to provide stability and
security for domain name owners, he said.
Republican Congressman Howard Coble (North Carolina) warned that ICANN
by proceeding with the expansion of the name space had “not for the
first time ignored what one might think is a mandatory instruction.”
Governments in ICANN’s own Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) had
raised concerns about the new TLD process, and the DoC had asked for
economic proof of the necessity of new TLDs, he said.
A week earlier a study from Interisle commissioned by ICANN also had
recommended first introducing a new security feature to the DNS, the DNS
Security Extensions protocol (DNSSEC), before moving on with the
introduction of new TLDs, said Coble. The study on “Scaling the Root” in
fact concluded ICANN could for stability reasons either introduce new
gTLDs, new international (IDN) TLDs and next generation internet (Ipv6)
or DNSSEC. It recommended to start with the latter, which will authorise
answers to name requests in the DNS and therefore make forgery more
difficult. The DoC already has announced that DNSSEC should be
introduced by the end of this year. To amalgamate the complicated
technology into the DNS system, root operators and the community should
be given 12 to 15 months before another addition to the system is
started, the study found.
ICANN: No Link between JPA and new TLDs
ICANN officials rejected the link between the dispute over TLDs and the
JPA contract discussions. ICANN’s new CEO, Rod Beckstrom, in a letter
dated 22 September wrote to several congressmen who had asked for
legislation to make US oversight permanent by legislation, that
consultations on the IP issues were still underway. “There is no link to
the conclusion of the JPA,,” he said.
ICANN Chief Operating Officer Doug Brent at the hearing outlined the
process on the future application procedure for new TLDs as an ongoing
discussion: a third version of the extensive applicant’s guidebook would
come out beginning of October, Brent said. Several protective measures
that were proposed by the “Implementation Recommendation Group“ (IRT)
were called upon by ICANN’s board chairman. The IRT work was seen by
other ICANN stakeholder groups including registries, registrars, and
non-commercial domain name holders as yet another round for the IP
community of undermining and bypassing the multi-stakeholder process
that had worked for months for a consensus.
“We will not allow an expansion that will not adequately protect
trademark owners,” reiterated Brent, and “it will not be an unbridled
expansion.” Delaying the process begun as part of ICANN’s overall
mandate to bring competition to the originally monopolistic domain name
system according to Beckstrom and Brent would only serve “to perpetuate
existing market conditions: concentration within some existing
registries, with most short generic strings unavailable and those that
trade on the value of the current marketplace, holding portfolios based
upon the value of current .com.”
Support for ICANN’s process to now finally push through with new generic
TLDs and non-English TLDs came from a coalition of domain name
registries like Core, registrars like ENOM, declared applicants for new
TLDs including the competitors for the .eco TLD of which one is
supported by former Vice President Al Gore and a Commissioner of the
Canadian Regulatory Authority (CRTC). In their letter to the ICANN
Board, the pro-TLD coalition urged ICANN to initiate the new TLD
application period without further delay as it would bring more
competition and consumer choice and avoid chaos stemming from an
alternative addressing scheme that would pop up if ICANN gave in to what
they see as fearmongering and “narrow arguments advanced so vociferously
by those who seek to preserve their advantages.”
End of the JPA, No End to US Control
So what will happen with a new agreement in place this week? ICANN
officials so far have not responded to requests for detailed
information. Beckstrom in his letter to the congressmen dated 21
September wrote: “I am in discussions with the NTIA (DoC National
Telecommunications and Information Administration) to establish a
long-standing relationship to accommodate principles including the
beliefs that ICANN should remain a nonprofit corporation based in the
United States, and should retain an ongoing focus on accountability and
transparency.“ ICANN should be made a permanent institution, said
Beckstrom, adding, “Accordingly, ICANN seeks to have a long-term
relationship with the United States government and also seeks to build
long-term relationships with other countries and contractual partners as
well.“
By the end of last week The Economist came out with leaked information
about an “independent“ ICANN, quoting a four-page paper about
“affirmations and commitments” that envisaged four oversight panels over
ICANN, checking on “competition among generic domains (such as .com and
.net), the handling of data on registrants, the security of the network
and transparency, accountability and the public interest.” The US would
only retain a permanent seat in the latter one, and representatives of
“foreign governments” would be included in the oversight panels. The
agreement sets up oversight panels that include representatives of
foreign governments to “conduct regular reviews of ICANN’s work in four
areas.”
The potential new oversight model would partly answer long-standing
requests for internationalisation, not the least from non-US
governments, according to Wolfgang Kleinwächter, an internet governance
expert and head of ICANN’s Nominating Committee. The member states of
Europe have passed another version of their “Guidelines on International
Management of the Domain Name System” demanding further development of
the private-sector-led bottom-up multi-stakeholder model for the
technical coordination and the day-to-day management of the DNS,
continued efforts towards full transparency and accountability and,
notably, a “strengthened” GAC “that has increased active membership (in
particular from developing countries), greater involvement in ICANN’s
policy development processes [..] and effective secretariat support.”
GAC members might be the ones who could fill the oversight panels, one
can speculate, and this might have come up during talks the NTIA held
with the EU Troika (Sweden, Spain and the European Commission) at a
meeting on the first of September, one of several meetings NTIA had with
governments around the world in the run-up to the JPA deadline.
The EU guidelines also state a need to stipulate and support dialogue
and cooperation on public policy issues pertaining to the internet“ in
general, a possible hint of the need for continued discussions at the
upcoming UN-led Internet Governance Forum in Egypt. The guidelines do
not touch on the new TLD process, yet recommend “the establishment of an
arbitration and dispute resolution mechanism base on international law
in case of disputes.” The burden to go to a California court to appeal
against a California-based ICANN decision has been mentioned at many new
TLD events in Europe recently.
In the end, a change in the JPA might bring some changes and pacify some
concerns over an overly US-centric ICANN. “From what I read, it looks
like a smart move,” said Kleinwächter. What it will not bring is
“independence” as ICANN will continue to be a government contractor for
what is the core “critical resource” - the root zone and internet
protocol address allocation management which are delegated via a
separation contract, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA)
contract. US authorities have always declared that they will hold on to
that one.
So after the JPA, it’s not over and discussions about the new TLDs can
be expected to continue, too, for a long time.
/Monika Ermert may be reached at info at ip-watch.ch
<mailto:info at ip-watch.ch>./
Categories: Access to Knowledge
<http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/category/access-to-knowledge/>, English
<http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/category/english/>, Features
<http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/category/features/>, Information and
Communications Technology/Broadcasting
<http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/category/information-and-communications-technology/>,
Trademarks/Geographical Indications
<http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/category/trademarksgeographical-indications/>,
US Policy <http://www.ip-watch.org/weblog/category/us-policy/>
PS : Concerning the pizza bet, my own opinion is that Milton just owes
a nice but empty pizza box...
because it is just a nice packaging change... :-D
--
------------------------------------------------------
Francis F. MUGUET Ph.D
MDPI Foundation Open Access Journals
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