The Noncommercial Stakeholder Group (NCSG) welcomes the 13 March 2014 statement from
the U.S. Commerce Department announcing its intention to “transition key Internet domain name
functions to the global multistakeholder community.” We support this move because an Internet
governance regime that gives one national government exclusive powers over a global resource
is open to the criticism that it is politically biased. We believe this has promoted divisiveness
and tendencies toward Internet fragmentation and we feel strongly that this change in
governance is long overdue.
NCSG supports all 5 of the principles proposed by NTIA to guide the transition. We agree that the
transition should:
● Support and enhance the multistakeholder model;
● Maintain the security, stability, and resiliency of the Internet DNS;
● Meet the needs and expectations of the global customers and partners of the IANA
services;
● Maintain the openness of the Internet;
● Not replace the NTIA role with a governmental or an intergovernmental organization.
It is very important to replace the current system with a carefully considered, well designed
alternative. We note that noncommercial stakeholders have been leaders in developing plans for
the proposed transition. Submissions to the Netmundial conference from two NCSG members,
the Internet Governance Project and Avri Doria, have set out specific proposals for the transition.
Consistent with both of these stakeholder contributions, NCSG proposes an additional principle
to guide the transition. The transition should seriously consider:
● Enhancing the accountability of ICANN through structural separation of the DNS root
zone management and IANA functions from ICANN’s policy making functions
The root zone management and IANA functions, which are currently performed by Verisign, Inc.
and ICANN under contracts with the U.S. government, are clerical, technical and operational.
The policy making activties of ICANN, on the other hand, are highly political. NCSG believes that
separating those two aspects of DNS governance into separate organizations is an idea that
should be seriously considered in the transition. Separating them could help ensure that those
with policy and political objectives must win support for their ideas in a fair and open policy
development process, and cannot arbitrarily impose them upon Internet users and service
providers by virtue of their control of the operational levers of the domain name system.
The existing IANA contract attempts to keep the two separate; however, if ICANN simply absorbs
the IANA and Verisign functions without any contractual obligations from the U.S. government,
some see a danger that the two could become integrated and intermingled in unhealthy ways.
The Department of Commerce has asked ICANN to “convene stakeholders across the global
Internet community to craft an appropriate transition plan.” We hope that ICANN’s management
will convene a process, not control it. The transition will not work unless ICANN runs a truly open
and deliberative process that allows all ideas to be considered and the best ideas to win. This
means that stakeholders from outside ICANN processes should be included in the transition.
NCSG is the voice of civil society and nonprofit organizations in ICANN’s domain name policy
making organ, the Generic Names Supporting Organization. It is composed of two
constituencies, the Noncommercial Users Constituency (http://ncuc.org) and the NonProfit
Operational Constituencies (http://www.npoc.org)
