Senate Appropriations Wants Insight into NTIA Role Within ICANN'S GAC

"NTIA frankly has not provided any substantive information to us about ICANN and their involvement in the GAC, other than that they're involved in the GAC,” a Republican Appropriations aide told us. The aide said the committee wanted to better understand NTIA’s role at ICANN and what it had specifically done to advocate for American consumers and companies to protect trademark and copyright infringement and individual privacy. The concerns were raised to the committee by private sector groups that “run the gamut” of those who follow ICANN, the aide said. The report asks NTIA to respond to the committee with a report within 30 days of the enactment of the appropriations bill, but the bill must still be addressed by the full Senate, and its companion must still be addressed by the full House. Neither the comparable House Appropriations bill nor its accompanying report mention ICANN (http://1.usa.gov/12ZogVy, http://1.usa.gov/1336n3u). NTIA declined to comment.

The language in the Senate report says NTIA should ensure ICANN’s actions “preserve the security, stability, and resiliency of the Internet for consumers, business, and the U.S. Government.” Security, stability and resiliency issues have been an issue of concern for ICANN since March, when the Internet infrastructure provider Verisign and others warned ICANN that many enterprises employ TLDs like .corp or .home to designate their intranet (WID May 28 p1). If ICANN delegates those strings, both of which have several applicants, end-users querying long-existing servers could be re-routed or even sent to phishing sites, the companies warned.

A consultant hired by ICANN to study the issue found substantial potential for such collisions, it said in a meeting last week that focused on the preliminary findings of its report (WID July 18 p5). The TLD for .home, which was the most frequently requested applied-for string, received over one billion requests over a 48-hour period, while the TLD .corp received over 153 million queries, it said. The GAC itself asked for further study into the security, stability and resiliency issues brought up at the meeting in its communique Thursday (WID July 19 p3). NetChoice Executive Director Steve DelBianco said: “With this report, Congress is aligned with governments around the world who are growing concerned that ICANN’s domain expansion could break parts of the Internet that are working well right now.” ICANN did not comment.

"It is critical that the NTIA, within 30 days, get back to the committee stating that there have been adequate steps taken to address this issue,” said Dan Jaffe, group executive vice president-government relations for the Association of National Advertisers, which has been critical of the security issues in the new generic TLD program since March (WID March 20 p9). NTIA “certainly has the authority, and they have some very knowledgeable people,” he said. “They do have the authority to get to the bottom of these issues, if they push [ICANN]. But there may be much more going on behind the scenes.” Nao Matsukata, CEO of the domain name consulting firm FairWinds Partners, said he also welcomes the Senate involvement. “The language they've written is accurate and to the point, and certainly reflects the concerns that I believe the private sector are feeling as a result of what happened at the GAC in Durban,” South Africa, he said. DelBianco also said the Senate report might sharpen ICANN’s focus on security risks as much as NTIA’s, especially following the study findings discussed in Durban last week. “Commerce and NTIA have a unique role in holding ICANN accountable -- not just for recognizing risks, but for action in mitigating risks and educating businesses about security problems that new TLDs could cause,” he said.

Others, however, were critical of the Senate’s request. Jonathan Nevett, co-founder of the portfolio applicant Donuts, Inc., said the Senate push wasn’t necessary. “As the new gTLD program nears completion after more than eight years of study, engagement and consensus building, a tiny handful of companies and organizations upset with the outcome have accelerated their external lobbying efforts,” he said. “The eleventh-hour concerns that have been raised by these special interests have little merit, and can be easily resolved through ICANN’s existing multi-stakeholder process."

Several stakeholders told us NTIA has been reluctant to exert too much pressure in the GAC, for fear the U.S. would be seen as trying to run the Internet through ICANN. The U.S. relationship with ICANN, through the Department of Commerce, has long been a point of contention among stakeholders and observers of the ICANN process (WID July 14/09 p7). “NTIA has had a very challenging role at ICANN in the GAC to balance broader support for ICANN while supporting U.S. economic interests. There’s been that tension,” Matsukata said. The Republican appropriations aide understood NTIA was concerned it would be “perceived that the United States is trying to run the Internet,” but said that NTIA needs “to protect the United States interests within the GAC and the ICANN process. That’s where the language came from, and that was the thinking."

Matsukata said the administration had conflicting goals within the ICANN process -- it wants to support the multistakeholder model and not overexert its power, but it also wants to support U.S. economic interests. Those two goals can conflict, he said, and the administration should better communicate what it wants NTIA to do in that situation. The GAC’s decision to recommend the rejection of .amazon provided a great example of that conflict, he said. When NTIA stepped aside to allow the GAC to reject .amazon (WID July 8 p7), it decided supporting the multistakeholder process was more important than supporting one of the country’s largest Internet retailers, Matsukata said. “They're in a tough spot,” he said, saying the difficulty made him question whether the U.S. should be exerting more pressure on ICANN, as the Senate requested, or perhaps even less. “We lose either way, which is why I raise the question: should we be supporting the structure and framework as it is now?” he asked. “I'm not sure that we should be supporting that multistakeholder process.”