CEA hails the FCC "for recognizing the path forward involves a free, competitive and open Internet," President Gary Shapiro said Thursday in a statement. But the rules FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler outlined "don’t strike the right balance, failing to encourage the competition and investment needed to keep the Internet growing and thriving," he said. "There is a need for a reasonable and balanced approach, and reclassification to Title II isn’t it." Wheeler's proposal would reclassify broadband as a common carrier service and impose the same net neutrality rules on fixed and mobile broadband. CTIA President Meredith Baker was also critical of Wheeler's proposals. "The mobile innovation and investment -- $120 billion since 2010 alone -- that American consumers rely on will be placed at risk by the FCC applying intrusive regulatory restrictions on mobile broadband for the first time," Baker said.
House Commerce Committee member John Shimkus, R-Ill., is soliciting co-sponsors for his Domain Openness Through Continued Oversight Matters Act, said a spokesman Wednesday. Shimkus expects to reintroduce DOTCOM in early February (see 1501200028), he said. The bill would let GAO study the IANA transition proposal for up to one year before approval by NTIA. Some of the committee members who are skeptical of the transition have been pleased by the ICANN community's efforts to include "stress tests" in their proposals, said David Redl, House Communications Subcommittee chief counsel, Tuesday (see 1501270042).
The Internet Society’s Singapore Chapter was selected as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority Coordination Group’s (ICG) secretariat contractor, ICANN said in a news release Tuesday. The chapter will coordinate meetings and communications for the ICG, it said.
The “problem” with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority transition is that “no one yet has a convincing explanation for how the multi-stakeholder model will be immune to pernicious influences from governments,” said The Washington Post in an editorial Sunday. “Details of the technical transition are being hammered out, but the accountability measures and controls that will be vital to establishing and preserving a legitimate global Internet governance are taking longer.” The Commerce Department “still holds a trump card: It can renew its contract with ICANN,” said the Post. The surveillance revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden shouldn’t be used as a “pretext” for foreign governments to “gain control” of Internet governance, it said. ICANN and NTIA didn’t comment.
Tech groups and public interest groups urged Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood to forgo subpoenas and legal action aimed at determining whether Google profits from ad sales linked to drug sales, piracy and other illegal acts offered online. The enforcement tools that Hood is seeking “would harm free expression and Internet security,” said Erik Stallman, general counsel for the Center for Democracy & Technology. They also would threaten the successful legal framework “that has made America the leader of the Internet economy,” he said in a blog post. Hood’s letters to Google and the subpoena “ignore this legal framework, and federal preemption in the area of copyright, entirely,” Stallman said. Instead, they seek to give attorneys general and rightsholders “the authority to curate and control web content and especially search results,” he said. Google filed a lawsuit last week against Hood claiming that he tried to censor the Internet by filing a subpoena (see 1412190045). The letter was signed by 13 organizations, including CDT, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Free Press.
High-level Internet governance officials agreed the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority transition should continue, but the issues on the NETMundial Initiative (NMI) need more work, in a meeting last week, an ICANN news release said Monday. The meeting’s participants included several ICANN board members, ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade, Internet Engineering Task Force Chairman Jari Arkko, Internet Society (ISOC) CEO Kathy Brown and Interactive Architecture Bureau Chairman Russ Housley, it said. ISOC refused to endorse the NETMundial Initiative’s Coordination Council in November (see 1411170031). Arkko and Housley want the initiative’s “structure defined after setting the terms of reference and scope of the work,” ICANN said. “More work needs to be done by NMI and with the various communities involved.”
“One way to provide an effective check on the ICANN board's power is to create statutory members of ICANN with extensive authority over the board,” said Daniel Castro, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation senior analyst, in a Wednesday op-ed in The Hill. Castro cited a 2010 paper by Shawn Gunnarson of Kirton McConkie, pointing to a California law, under which ICANN operates, that requires nonprofits to have statutory members. “This authority could include removing board members, overturning board decisions,” among other provisions, said Castro. ICANN didn’t comment.
NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling countered Wall Street Journal columnist Gordon Crovitz’s Dec. 1 article that called for the U.S. to retain control of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority contract. “Crovitz’s criticism is rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of the U.S. role in the DNS [domain name system]. No one entity controls the Internet,” Strickling said Sunday in the WSJ. Strickling said he took issue with Crovitz’s “continued mischaracterization that there is a September deadline for this transition.” "NTIA’s current contract with Icann, which operates technical functions related to the DNS, expires on Sept. 30, 2015, but we have repeatedly stated that if the transition plan is not ready by then, we can extend the contract,” he said. “The Obama administration is so uncomfortable with American exceptionalism that it violated the cardinal rule of good government: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Crovitz said last week.
The Chinese government has “legitimized” ICANN and the notion of “one global Internet,” said ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade in a videoconference Monday. He said he had just returned from China’s World Internet Conference. The “danger” of the Chinese government partitioning its Internet is “largely behind us,” he said. That’s “extremely powerful and notable,” said Chehade. The Chinese expect to have a “seat at the table” in global Internet governance debates, he said. China’s participation within and endorsement of such debates was “impossible” as long as the U.S. maintained its contract over the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions with ICANN, said Chehade. ICANN couldn’t claim China had an “equal seat at the table” while the U.S. had authority over the IANA functions, he said. “By ‘seat at the table’ Fadi was not talking ‘seat on the ICANN Board’ but rather the euphemistic seat at the table of discussion,” emailed an ICANN spokesman Wednesday. He said ICANN has had Chinese board members in the past; Hualin Qian served from 2003 to 2006 and Pindar Wong served as the board’s first vice chairman in 1999.
The U.S. government and the FCC need to ensure that the ITU “stays focused on its core function” of standards development for broadband access, FCC Commissioner Michael O’Reilly said at a commission meeting Friday. O’Reilly suggested the U.S. should pursue a leadership position at the ITU to continue to promote its agenda. The ITU’s mandate won’t change for the next four years, since no amendments were passed at its recent Plenipotentiary, said Kathryn O’Brien, assistant chief of the FCC International Bureau. The U.S. government had a “very positive outcome” at the conference, she said. Conference proposals that called on the ITU to become involved in surveillance regulations and that would have “undermined” the multistakeholder model were rejected, O’Brien said. The FCC's chief desire is to maintain the ITU’s remit on standards development and best practices for cybersecurity and access to broadband, she said.