After US stewardship: who should govern the internet’s root zone?

For its 49th meeting, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) came back to Singapore, the place where it met for the first time in 1999. The private internet governance body came with a big announcement in its pocket, namely to move an ultimate step away from the oversight by the government of the United States of America. As bold as it already is, the step comes with a major consultation process attached.

In a first statement, ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé promised a plan for this unique endeavour. Around April 7 2014, a roadmap for the consultation shall be published, fed by community comments collected along the way. The remark was met by lots of bows towards the United States decision to hand over ist supervision role.

To make things just a little more complicated, ICANN will start two public consultations, Chehadé explained during a solemn opening session in Singapore on March 24. One consultation would be on the transition of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the second on the Affirmation of Commitments (AoC) between ICANN and the United States, according to Chehadé.

ICANN wants to two separate consultations

IANA handles a bundle of functions for the core internet infrastructure, including the management of the root zone of the Domain Name System (DNS), the allocation of IP number blocks to the regional IP-address registries and the operation of the registry for protocol numbers, the latter as a service for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). So far, ICANN performed the IANA functions as a contractor for the US government, which is represented by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The NTIA could have terminated the IANA contract, thereby diminishing ICANN to its task as multi-stakeholder policy organisation for domain name policies.

The NTIA also checked any change to the root zone of the DNS. Even though NTIA head Larry Strickling belittled this as “a rather clerical function,” the US government’s hand on the root zone file had been source of much diplomatic controversy over the years.

Separately from the future IANA management consultation, the community also had to decide,“who is going to keep the ICANN in check,” as Chehadé said. An agreement between the NTIA and ICANN, the Affirmation of Commitments (AoC), established 2009, governed regular review processes of ICANN's work and is the major accountability mechanism at this time. With the withdrawal of US oversight, “we, as a community, should look at that and should look more broadly at ICANN's accountability and discuss how do we evolve,” Chehadé stressed.

Need for a new accountability mechanism

Many experts, including government representatives gathered in the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC), have pointed at accountability as a critical issue for the post-US-stewardship times. One of the worst case scenarios painted by some US business representatives is a future ICANN, overburdened with lawsuits, overpowered by governments who pull the plug on top level domains they do not like.

The NTIA in its announcement has firmly declared a government-led or intergovernmental solution a no-go-area, “possibly a sour point” for some governments, as Strickling acknowledged.

Attempts to govern the process

The choice made by ICANN to separate the debates about accountability and the IANA function was criticised by experts like Milton Mueller of Syracuse University and founder of the Internet Governance Project. Would ICANN take on a combined role for domain name policy, domain name system operator and oversight function, the “stakes of accountability would rise considerably,” Mueller said in one of the sessions on March 24. Mueller has been promoting structural (instead of only functional, ICANN-internal) separation and criticised today's statements by Chehadé, who insisted that no new organisations would be necessary. ICANN should not be pre-empting potential solutions and should also not declare the debate off the table at Net Mundial, the Global Multi-Stakeholder-Conference organised by Brazil, ICANN and a number of other governments. Net Mundial established originally in reaction to the revelations of Edward Snowden, by some experts like Wolfgang Kleinwächter - internet governance expert and a member of the ICANN board - as a chance to broaden the multi-stakeholder model to further internet policy areas.

The NTIA had been asking ICANN to “convene global stakeholders,” not to consult them, said Jordan Carter, Executive director of InternetNZ, the country code registry of New Zealand. “Consultation is a top-down process where elites choose what they will do and tell the rest of us.”

InternetNZ has offered a view on potential models of how to aggregate or separate the functions handed over by NTIA in a short paper. It illustrates for all familiar and newcomers to the discussion how interwoven the different tasks are.

Global consultation or convening of interested parties to talk such models through will be tough, no doubt. Nevertheless one step with regard to realising the potential of multi-stakeholder self-governance would mean to bring end-users and not only the industry and governments into the discussions, said Olivier Crepin-Leblond, Chair of the At-Large-Advisory Committee of ICANN. A new AoC should also involve more parties, end-users included. So while many were amazed by the US government's move to give up control over central infrastructure resources, it is still up to debate where the power will be shifted to.

A complete list of IANA-related submissions to the upcoming NetMundial conference have been prepared by journalist Samantha Dickinson here.