FOIA'd Documents Show NTIA Aiding Google's Cerf in Writing Pro-IANA Transition Commentary
NTIA officials encouraged and aided Google Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf in March 2014 as he wrote an opinion piece in favor of the now-completed Internet Assigned Numbers Authority transition, according to a batch of archived emails that Americans for…
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Limited Government (ALG) obtained in late January as part of its Freedom of Information Act request on analyses of the legal and policy justifications for the handoff. ALG criticized NTIA Thursday for “sitting on” the “most responsive documents” related to the conservative group's FOIA request until after the IANA oversight switchover's Oct. 1 completion (see 1610030042 and 1702020073). Then-NTIA Associate Administrator Fiona Alexander initially contacted Cerf March 19, 2014, the day The Wall Street Journal published a column by former Publisher Gordon Crovitz that criticized the legal justification for the handoff. NTIA announced plans for the switchover the week before (see report in the March 17, 2014, issue). “While the press has gotten better there have been a couple of unhelpful oped’s including” the Crovitz column, Alexander said in an email to Cerf that was also copied to then-NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling. “Obviously those folks are uni[n]formed but our press folks were wondering if you were going to write something.” Cerf said he had already written a commentary supporting the transition but said he was “struggling with the PR team at Google who seem very reluctant to let me get out in front of this because they don’t want this to be about Google. Let me see if we can accelerate the ICANN piece.” Cerf forwarded NTIA officials a copy of his draft, which they believed should more directly counter Crovitz. “Obviously [Crovitz] lacks any technical understanding” of the transition, Alexander said. NTIA suggested Cerf add a paragraph to counter claims that the handoff would lead to government capture and censorship of the domain name system. The version of Cerf's commentary that eventually ran in a May/June 2014 IEEE publication included an amended version of the NTIA-suggested paragraph, though it didn't mention concerns about censorship. NTIA's attempt to influence the content of Cerf's opinion piece may have constituted direct engagement in “propaganda on an issue of public import,” which was prohibited in the FY 2014 omnibus federal spending bill, said ALG Senior Editor Robert Romano in a Friday blog post. That NTIA waited almost three years to release the emails between Cerf and NTIA officials shows the agency knew “it was embarrassing,” Romano said. “But it might have been devastating at the time. The fact that the agency would collude with a vice president at Google and a government contractor, ICANN, illegally as it turned out, in formulating an oped beneficial to Google and the monopolist ICANN, would have been scandalous.” The Department of Commerce, Google and ICANN didn't comment.