I'm heading up to Vancouver tomorrow for the ICANN meeting.
I hope to see you all there.
Recently ICANN's Chairman was thus quoted:
Q: Critics say the U.S. government basically controls the Internet.
A: That's bulls—t. I'm sorry, I'm not supposed to say that to reporters, but that's just a very bad misunderstanding. Ninety-nine percent of the Internet is in private hands. If you've got a computer at home, and a cable box or DSL line, you own a piece of the Internet. Most of the Internet is owned by the private sector, by businesses, by ISPs, by individuals, by governments—well, that's not [the] private sector, but it's not ICANN either and it's not the United States.
Rubbish.
The Internet is like the sea - the vast bulk is not subject to any particular authority.
However like the seas, the Internet has its Panama and its Suez; the internet has its Molucca Straits.
ICANN stands astride the naming systems of the internet just as Panama, Egypt, and Indonesia stand over the oceans' most critical shipping lanes.
ICANN sprung from the loins of United States Department of Commerce. The DoC frequently denies its role as parent, but it has most overtly and forcefully confirmed ICANN's dependency on, and subservience to, the United States.
Nothing happens at the top layer of the internet's naming system without ICANN approval. And nothing happens in ICANN that is not subject to the advice and consent of the United States Department of Commerce.
The Department of Commerce/ICANN system has suppressed competition, has cost consumers of domain names billions of dollars, and has obstructed innovation across the entire internet. ICANN has destroyed the internet end-to-end principle by forcing decisions about top level domains to flow through ICANN's expensive and arbitrary procedures.
So for ICANN's chairman to imply that the US government is not using ICANN to control a critical part of the internet is an exercise in misdirection and is, ultimately, untrue.
And to add insult to injury, ICANN has adopted rules, most notably the privacy-busting WHOIS and the trademark-uber-alles UDRP that reach out and impose a supra national law on all of those end-user "personal" computers that ICANN's chairman claims are not the property of the US or under the control of ICANN. If the US or ICANN do not have internet-wide powers, then why are we users of the internet forced to list our names, addresses, and other information in the WHOIS database and why are we forced to submit to ICANN's UDRP?
There is a lot of hoopla about the US "winning" at the WSIS meeting.
While it may be true that the US browbeat its way to what it wanted, the result is a stunning defeat for the interests of users of the internet.
There exists no body today that is watching over the internet to ensure that it continues to operate.
ICANN does not do that, and the WSIS participants were not asking to do it either.
The fact is: The internet remains in at risk.
There is no body that is responsible to the public that oversees the operation of critical core resources of the internet to ensure that packets traverse the net from source IP address to destination IP address with dispatch and reasonable (but not guaranteed) reliability.
There is no body that is responsible to the public that oversees the operation of the upper tier of DNS servers to ensure that domain name queries are answered quickly, accurately, reliably, and without preference for, or prejudice against, anyone.
The only thing that the United States "won" was a continuation of the status quo, which is to say ICANN will continue as almost nothing more than a body that regulates business practices of those who sell domain names.
So, if, or rather when, a network-Katrina hits the internet, we can blame the folks in the US government who confound business regulation with technical oversight.
The community of internet users requires more from internet governance than this.
It's been an interesting, and very exhausting, week - I spent a couple of days at a gathering of intellectual property lawyers in Napa, then three days at the Hackers Conference (as usual, extremely interesting, but we operate under a cone of silence, so no details), and this morning I had to come across the bay to Monterey - which, to to bring me to my topic, is a long way from Tunisia.
Tunisia? That's where the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) is meeting this week. From what I have seen there are a lot of flowery words that largely seem to be euphemisms hiding the difficult and harsh reality that some nations have more wealth than others.
The internet is a core element of WSIS discussions. And it appears from those on-site that the question of country-code top level domains (ccTLDs) has come to the fore. As is natural in a meeting among nations, there is a pretty broad acceptance of the idea that control of a ccTLD is an attribute of sovereignty. It appears that the principal opponent of that idea is the United States, which says that it wants ICANN to continue to be the overlord of ccTLDs. The position of the US is inconsistent with its own actions - the United States simply evaded ICANN when it came to redelegating the .us ccTLD. But hey, I've gotten use to my own national government saying one thing and then doing the opposite. Is there any wonder why people here in the US mistrust bodies of government?
Let's assume for the moment that the role of recognizing and selecting the operator for a country-code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) is not an appropriate role for a private United States based corporation that has substantial ties to the United States government.
Let's assume for the moment that the job of recognizing the appropriate national authority to operate a given ccTLD is vested into a new body. What ought that body to look like? And where does that leave ICANN?
As I have mentioned elsewhere, I believe that one of the architectural principles that WSIS ought to follow is "form follows function". In other words, once we decide to vest ccTLD questions into a new body, that new body should be shaped, and rigidly constrained, to deal with ccTLD questions and only with ccTLD questions. This body should have as its job, and as its only job, the following tasks:
The first two of these tasks have political overtones, the latter two are clerical and non-discretionary.
This ccTLD body needs no formal linkage to ICANN or any other body that assembles the published ccTLD information into a domain name system root zone file or operates root servers. ICANN or these other bodies can simply utilize the published information when they build root zone files.
Thinking of the the construction of root zone files - is this really an appropriate job for ICANN? I think not, at least not by default.
Since each group of root server operators must not only pick the root zone file it will publish but must also modify that root zone file to contain the names and IP addresses of its root servers, as well as any DNSSEC key information, it makes more sense for each group of root server operators to define how its root zone file is to be built, and by whom.
There is no need to establish any institution of internet governance to construct root zone files. The job is clerical and non-discretionary. It does not take a great deal of time - much of it ought to be automated. But it is a job that should be done with great care, with substantial and frequent checks for quality, and with an effective means to return to a workable status quo ante should an error occur.
What is of importance here is that because the job of root zone file preparation is really an aspect of operating a system of root servers, there is no need to vest that job into ICANN. It may be that some operators of root servers may chose to hire ICANN to do the work on their behalf, but that is the choice of root server operators and need not be of concern to WSIS.
If ICANN is no longer the vessel for ccTLD questions and root zone preparation then what is left of ICANN?
ICANN has already abrogated nearly all of its role over IP addresses to the regional IP address registries; ICANN, via its performance of the IANA function, merely allocates large blocks of addresses to the RIRs. This, so far, has been largely free of non-technical dispute. IP address assignment at the IANA level has become a discretionary clerical function, albeit one that should be exercised with substantial technical knowledge and with flexible concern for a set of guidelines that are evolving mainly from the RIRs and their processes (and not via ICANN.)
IANA is really the secretariat of the IETF. IANA is far from the only source of numbers used on the internet. The IEEE, ITU, W3C, and other bodies also provide many of the agreed-upon numbers used to coordinate the internet. IANA, less the ccTLD role, should be returned to the IETF.
IANA has no more business being placed on the stage of internet governance than does the secretariat of the IEEE, of the ITU, or of any other standards body. And IANA has no more claim to a tax on internet users than does any other standards body. If IANA is to benefit from an ICANN-imposed tax on domain names to support IANA than the IEEE, ITU, and other bodies have an equal right to the proceeds of that tax. If those other bodies have no such claim than neither should IANA.
After removing ccTLDs, root zone preparation, and IANA from ICANN, what's left of ICANN? What remains is ICANN's position at the head of a pyramid of contracts that regulate the practices, products, and prices of those companies that ICANN has granted (for a fee and a cut of the action) the privilege of engaging in the business of selling domain names.
It seems to me that we ought not elevate this residual aspect of ICANN to the vaulted and insulated position of a body of supra-national governance. Rather we should recognize it for what it is: a combination in restraint of trade. Perhaps it is a combination that we want to retain, perhaps not. But we should neither blind ourselves nor put on rose colored glasses when we ask the question whether the domain name marketplace, and its customers, the community of internet users, are harmed or helped by this remaining part of ICANN.
I've often said that ICANN regulates the business of buying and selling of domain names and that ICANN's claim that it coordinates technical matters to preserve the stability of DNS is a fantasy.
Well I am proven wrong.
ICANN has done something technical.
ICANN has issued Guidelines for the Implementation of Internationalized Domain Names, Draft Version 2 (pending approval by the ICANN board.)
It's only four pages long, but those few pages contain a lot of significant material. But as in all things IDN-ish, solutions are not easy (in fact, IDN is a particularly difficult subject.) I'd like to hear the opinions of folks like Paul Hoffman and James Seng. Paul H. had some negative comments on an earlier draft over at CircleId. It's not clear to me that Paul's concerns have been addressed in the new guidelines.
(Version 1 came out back in 2003. I spent some time on the ICANN Board's committee on IDN's but my work on that was derailed when ICANN forced me to take legal action against ICANN for its unlawful denial of my right as a director to inspect ICANN's financial records.)
The new guidelines are an extension of the original rules. The new material largely deals with the issue of domain names in different "scripts" (character sets for different languages) that look like one another and could lead to visual confusion.
Very much a small nit about the new guidelines document - the hyperlinks in the Acrobat (.pdf) file seem to be non-functional. Perhaps that's the fault of my Acrobat viewer rather than the document.
So I find myself now having to amend my statement that ICANN does nothing of a technical nature. Yet when one places the four pages of new guidelines against the thousands upon thousands of pages of ICANN's business regulations we can see that I need merely amend my statement to be that ICANN does almost nothing of a technical nature.