| ICANN, DoC and the expiring JPA
Posted: 9/28/2009 10:30:00 PM | ICANN, the quasi-governmental regulatory body that controls all the domain name and IP addresses on the Internet is administered by a Joint Project Agreement from the US department of commerce in an agreement that began around 2000 and expires on September 30, 2009.
The Economist magazine broke the story of ICANN's post JPA arrangement:
http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14517430
Regulating the internet
ICANN be independent
Sep 24th 2009
From The Economist print edition
America is poised to loosen its control over cyberspace
FORTY years ago this month American academics sent the first message over the ARPANET, a military network that was the precursor of today’s internet. A legacy of those efforts is that the American government continues to control the internet’s underlying technology—notably the system of allocating addresses. This is about to change, albeit slightly.
For the past decade America has delegated some of its authority over the internet to a non-profit organisation called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)—an arrangement other countries have complained about, both because they have little say in it and because ICANN’s management has occasionally proved erratic. ICANN’s latest mandate is due to expire on September 30th. The day before, a new accord is planned to come into effect, whereby America will pass some of its authority over ICANN to the “internet community” of businesses, individual users and other governments.
Previous agreements had maintained close American oversight over ICANN and imposed detailed reforms, but the latest document, called an “affirmation of commitments”, is only four pages long. It gives ICANN the autonomy to manage its own affairs. Whereas prior agreements had to be renewed every few years, the new one has no fixed term.
The agreement sets up oversight panels that include representatives of foreign governments to conduct regular reviews of ICANN’s work in four areas: competition among generic domains (such as .com and .net), the handling of data on registrants, the security of the network and transparency, accountability and the public interest—the only panel on which America will retain a permanent seat. But there are no penalties if ICANN fails to heed its new overseers short of a termination of the accord.
The changes at ICANN come at a time when the number of addresses is set to expand dramatically. Next year ICANN plans to allow the creation of many more domains. There are currently 21 generic ones in addition to the 280 country suffixes (such as .uk for Britain). ICANN also intends to authorise domain names in other scripts, which will allow entire web addresses to be written in languages such as Chinese and Arabic.
All this is controversial. Firms that have already spent a fortune to protect their brands online fear that the expansion will create a huge legal quagmire. Some American politicians are backing calls from trademark holders to call it off. Yet the firms that register new addresses support new domains. There are nearly 200m internet addresses in use (see chart), which are thought to generate more than $2.5 billion a year in renewal fees. New domains will add to that.
The new set-up at ICANN will not placate countries such as China, Russia and Iran that want America to relinquish control entirely. However ICANN runs itself, it cannot alter the basic piping of the internet without America’s approval under another agreement that lasts until 2011. Even then, that is unlikely to change.
To which I responded:
Sirs;
Your article on the JPA with ICANN examines two major points: "damage" to brands and non-US control.
ICANN was created in secret by the US government from the primordial slime of the "DNS" wars of the late 1990s, in secret and is one of the least open and transparent "non-profits" in existence. Can you imagine in a real company where a board member has to sue to see the company books? http://www.cavebear.com/archive/icann-board/index.htm
When the USG formed ICANN it was tasked with three things: devolve the NSI (now Verisign) monopoly, do something about the unfortunate intersection of trademark law and the Internet domain name system, and create new TLDs.
From the DNS community standpoint, this was backwards. We had already created new top level domains and a myriad of new root-server systems in order to show the "rough consensus and running code" the Internet has traditionally been built on. We felt this would devolve the NSI monopoly just fine thank you - but this was in 1996 with less than a million .com names, and that the trademark problem was best left to the courts and congress.
Within the first year of ICANN had instituted regulatory control over NSI, an NSF startup that had become a victim of not only its own success but the lack of any competition. And new "anti-cybersquatting" laws were enacted in the US by congress, and the findings of courts had become less the random jurisprudence it was in the late 90s: a score for brand owners, while actual domain name ownership, the 21st century virtual real estate, became a shakier proposition.
With domains, arguably the next form of intellectual property to join patents, trademarks and copyrights, the rights of the domain name owner are the least protected of these four by a large margin, and at every level in the domain name system.
Ten years later the creation of new top level domains is still "under study" and such false flag distractions as "lack of consumer demand" and "harmful to brand owners", like a raw onion at lunch, keep repeating, over and over.
ICANN ten years later had still not made any new tlds, the ones made in 2000 were a joke and show the failure of the ICANN regime especially in light of the progress made by the alternative root server systems before ICANN went on a rampage and lebeled them "rouge" and invented technical nonsense to pretend to justify their near criminal status. http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2826.html which amounts to nothing more than 1) BIND is buggy and 2) our accounting is bad. Tech gurus and adademics alike pointed out the obvious but to no avail: http://ietfreport.isoc.org/all-ids/draft-higgs-virtual-root-00.txt http://arxiv.org/pdf/cs/0109021
As internet functionality becomes embedded in new consumer appliances, there is a tendency now to eschew the Internet DNS and use a different mechanism for naming devices, the regulatory chokehold ICANN has on the domain name space and the mismanagement of IP addresses and the artificial scarcity of both is cited as the reason. This is unfortunate and wasteful. In plainer language the US system is being bypassed and development goes elsewhere.
Fast forward a decade later, in a world with 80M .com names, NSI+ICANN have killed the market and I fear for the investment people and organizations are now making in the new top level domain industry. I wish them well, but it's not the robust and expanding market it was a decade ago. I'm not going to be surprised if soe of these don't actuall break even.
Hopefully the JPA will morph into quietly finessing bits and pieces of ICANN into the US government proper: the FCC can more than handle policy and is currently making the right noises, and NIST can do the actual bit-twiddling it already does so well.
As a Welshman living in Canada I have no problem with the US government continuing administration of their assets, and in fact, protected by the US Constitution I can't see a country I'd rather see administering it, where it enjoys the due process and transparency it deserves. But this is absent now as a California "non-profit" government contractor whose life on the edges leads to egregious abuse. This shape-shifter acts like the fed when it wants to and other times it's just a private organization pretending governments don't exist. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=291221
Richard J. Sexton
richard@root-servers.orsc | |
|
Home
login 