How to build real accountability into the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the $60,000 question in Internet governance circles these days. While we don’t yet have the right answer, we just heard one answer that can be ruled out as a non-starter.
The Technology Policy Institute (TPI) this week published a report calling for ICANN to be accountable just to the domain name industry players with which it holds contracts — namely registrars and registries. TPI’s reasoning is that registries and registrars are ICANN’s primary “users,” and provide most of its funding.
The reality, of course, is that Internet registrants — the millions of businesses, people and organizations who own Internet domains — are the primary supporters of ICANN. Registrars and registries may collect the fees, but Internet registrants pay them, and have a vested interest in ICANN’s policy-development process.
Moreover, there are billions of internet users who rely on these domains for information, commerce, and communications, and they also have a stake in holding ICANN accountable for maintaining the security and stability of the domain name system.
To arrive at its conclusions, the TPI paper compares ICANN to purportedly similar member-driven standards-setting bodies such as the American National Standards Institute, Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, and International Telecommunication Union.
But ICANN is very different from these other bodies in its organizational structure, scope, and the size of its constituency. The challenge in ICANN is not that it has too many stakeholders, but rather that those stakeholders lack a consistent means to challenge adverse decisions and hold the body accountable for its actions.
Making ICANN solely accountable to registries and registrars would solve one problem — the weakness of ICANN’s accountability mechanism — only to replace it with another, larger problem — disenfranchising a massive and critical block of ICANN’s constituents. Businesses, service providers, users, and public interest advocates would be among those left out in the cold under TPI’s recommendation.
TPI is right about one thing: the current accountability mechanisms within ICANN are wholly insufficient, and could become a major liability if ICANN severs its ties with the U.S. Government, which has served as an accountability backstop for the past decade.
The $60,000 accountability question still needs to be answered, and answered correctly, before ICANN “transitions” away from the only real accountability mechanism it is has ever known.
Steve DelBianco
How to build real accountability into the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the $60,000 question in Internet governance circles these days. While we don’t yet have the right answer, we just heard one answer that can be ruled out as a non-starter.
The Technology Policy Institute (TPI) this week published a report calling for ICANN to be accountable just to the domain name industry players with which it holds contracts — namely registrars and registries. TPI’s reasoning is that registries and registrars are ICANN’s primary “users,” and provide most of its funding.
The reality, of course, is that Internet registrants — the millions of businesses, people and organizations who own Internet domains — are the primary supporters of ICANN. Registrars and registries may collect the fees, but Internet registrants pay them, and have a vested interest in ICANN’s policy-development process.
Moreover, there are billions of internet users who rely on these domains for information, commerce, and communications, and they also have a stake in holding ICANN accountable for maintaining the security and stability of the domain name system.
To arrive at its conclusions, the TPI paper compares ICANN to purportedly similar member-driven standards-setting bodies such as the American National Standards Institute, Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, and International Telecommunication Union.
But ICANN is very different from these other bodies in its organizational structure, scope, and the size of its constituency. The challenge in ICANN is not that it has too many stakeholders, but rather that those stakeholders lack a consistent means to challenge adverse decisions and hold the body accountable for its actions.
Making ICANN solely accountable to registries and registrars would solve one problem — the weakness of ICANN’s accountability mechanism — only to replace it with another, larger problem — disenfranchising a massive and critical block of ICANN’s constituents. Businesses, service providers, users, and public interest advocates would be among those left out in the cold under TPI’s recommendation.
TPI is right about one thing: the current accountability mechanisms within ICANN are wholly insufficient, and could become a major liability if ICANN severs its ties with the U.S. Government, which has served as an accountability backstop for the past decade.
The $60,000 accountability question still needs to be answered, and answered correctly, before ICANN “transitions” away from the only real accountability mechanism it is has ever known.
Steve DelBianco