Proposed ICANN Status Change Questioned
An advisory panel last month urged ICANN to consider becoming a private international organization (PIO) to widen its presence and stabilize its operations. The President’s Strategy Committee (PSC) stressed that such a transformation must fit ICANN values such as including all parts of the Internet community and the need for accountability and openness. But some observer said the move mainly would serve to dodge those obligations and in any case the U.S. govt. would never buy it.
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PIO examples cited include the International Red Cross and the Fertilizer Industry Assn. ICANN isn’t like either one, lawyer Beckwith Burr, a former NTIA official active in domain name system privatization, said: “It may be a nonprofit but it is not a charity, and it controls a vital global economic resource.”
If someone wants to run a domain registry or act as a registrar and ICANN won’t give it a contract, U.S. law holds ICANN accountable, Burr said. That also goes for other players ICANN harms. “Before we eliminate that safeguard by giving ICANN the ‘privileges and immunities’ of an international organization, we need to be sure that there is a real, meaningful, and workable alternative in place,” she said.
Many constituents believe ICANN’s only saving grace is that it’s nominally accountable to its community via such mechanisms as the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy for domain-name challenges, the Whois database and the courts, said Andrew Klungness, an intellectual property and e- commerce lawyer. The PIO idea seems to be a way to avoid the many lawsuits that drain ICANN’s resources, perhaps on the theory that the money saved would trickle down to end-users in the form of better services, he said.
Although the Internet Governance Project wants “to see ICANN turned loose from direct U.S. government supervision by the Commerce Department, we still want it to be subject to legal checks and balances,” Prof. Milton Mueller of the Syracuse U. School of Information Studies said: “If it does things that are really out of line, you need to be able to sue it, to put it bluntly.” Many sympathize with the burden of litigation, and its potential bias toward deep-pocketed litigants, but those dangers “are outweighed by the larger danger of an unaccountable global agency with such direct authority over how the Internet works,” Mueller said.
It’s unclear if the PIO concept is “pie in the sky” or a strategic move by ICANN toward “something else,” Klungness said. “The key point is that the U.S. government isn’t warm to the idea,” said U. of Miami law prof. Michael Froomkin. At a March American Society of International Law panel, Froomkin wrote on ICANN Watch, he asked U.S. State Dept.’s David Gross what the U.S.’s position was likely to be on ICANN becoming a PIO. “While cautioning that he had not read the strategy paper, and thus couldn’t comment on it directly, Ambassador Gross said that both the U.S. and many other governments would find any proposal which did not have a role for any governments akin to that which the U.S. currently plays ‘very unsatisfactory,'” Froomkin wrote. Neither Gross nor ICANN commented.