Page History

White Paper: “Making ICANN Relevant, Responsive and Respected”

Initial Authors:

• Yrjö Länsipuro
• Evan Leibovitch
• Carlton Samuels
• Jean-Jacques Subrenat

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• Hong Xue 薛虹

DRAFT

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Not for public distribution at this time

Release 0.08
22 February 2012

Introduction

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is well into its second decade. Overall, informed Internet users and professionals consider that ICANN has performed its role as a technical coordinator of the Internet’s unique identifiers rather well, ensuring the reliability and enhancing the security of the Domain Name System (DNS). This stewardship occurred over a period during which the number of Internet users grew by several orders of magnitude to more than two billion today, and when practically all areas of human activity have come to rely on the Internet, arguably the first truly global infrastructure in history.  Amazing though the quantitative growth has been, the qualitative change of the Internet has proven to be even more fundamental, from a narrow, optional extra communication channel into a must-have, broad platform of essential and critical services for a large part of humanity. The Internet now has to deal with governance and policy issues far more complex, and more intertwined with other spheres of life than in 1998 when ICANN was set up. Many of the difficulties ICANN is now faced with come from the magnitude and speed of change.

The Challenges facing ICANN

Accordingly, questions are now being raised about whether the present ecosystem of Internet governance, including ICANN, is able to adapt to such momentous change. The challenges fall into four main areas:

1) The public interest:

In this continuously evolving environment,  has ICANN arrived at a more accurate comprehension of public interest requirements, and adapted its methods in order to better serve them, or has it remained deferential to the interests of those who, from the outset, were its original most powerful stakeholders (registries, registrars)? Business interests within the ICANN community have suggested the need for a legal definition of the public interest, while others have viewed such a demand as a maneuver to sideline this central issue altogether. In its pioneering years, ICANN could live with such an ambiguity, but it is now required to ensure that the overall purpose of its multi-stakeholder model does indeed serve the public interest. ICANN’s often unsatisfactory response to publicly-identified problems, compounded by its inability to enforce its own regulations, have appeared to stem from ignoring, or being hostile to, the public interest. The lack of a lucid public-interest engagement strategy, combined with an At-Large infrastructure that currently struggles to fulfil its outreach and advocacy mandates, undermines the respect and trust of worldwide Internet users towards ICANN. Dwindling confidence invites consideration of alternatives to the multi-TLD naming paradigm, some of which have enjoyed considerable consumer success. At a time when the very relevance of ICANN is being challenged, what are the reforms that could comfort its role?

2) The growing complexity of governance:

The arrangements for the global governance of the Internet’s critical resources (including ICANN’s internal governance arrangements) are inherited from the pioneering years. A crucial question now arises: are these arrangements commensurate with the legitimate expectations of the worldwide Internet community, ever more a producer and consumer of content, in an ever more diversified cultural and linguistic context? Some criticism has been levelled at the Board: it sets very high standards for the whole community, while failing to abide by the same standards regarding its internal governance arrangements. Indeed, the internal governance of ICANN now needs to evolve sharply, because in a decade the corporation has grown from a small group of closely-connected pioneers to an entity with global responsibilities and worldwide operations. The Board of Directors of ICANN spends inordinate energy and time arbitrating between sometimes divergent positions of its own stakeholders, and this is due to the growing discrepancy between the multi-stakeholder dogma (equality among stakeholders) and the inequality in their roles (Advisory Committees, Supporting Organizations). What are the necessary changes (e.g. with regard to Conflicts of Interest, in the By-laws), and more generally, how can the trust of the community in ICANN be enhanced?

3) Why has it been so difficult to implement ICANN’s multi-stakeholder model (MSM)?

More than a decade after ICANN’s creation, some fundamental questions must be raised: why has the MSM of Internet governance not been truly implemented? Is this because the initial arrangements for the MSM have proven inefficient? Have the stakeholders been treated like equal partners, and have they been able to perform as such? Has the MSM been side-tracked through the intent of some and the neglect of others? Or was the very notion of equal responsibility among stakeholders so Utopian that it was doomed to fail, in a decade when industry self-regulation was touted as the ultimate system of checks and balances for a thriving economic system? These questions are not rhetorical. On some occasions, ICANN’s Board of Directors, in contradiction with consensus policy, chose to rule over the objections of several stakeholder groups (e.g. by granting exceptions to the International Olympic Committee with regard to a requested generic top-level domain name, or gTLD). Clearly, the MSM is coming under increased pressure from nations. It is worth noting that many sovereign states first dismissed the Internet and the DNS as a subordinate phenomenon, but having understood its critical importance, they are now  attempting to regain control of the system through some inter-governmental structure which would in effect annihilate the MSM (in the classic inter-governmental model, national or international public authority is by construct above all other structures or participants). The challenge now is not to discard, but on the contrary to overhaul the multi-stakeholder system, if necessary by revising those By-laws governing the status and role of stakeholders, so as to engender the informed consent of all ICANN’s components, including sovereign states represented in its Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC).

4) Institutional and practical cooperation:

Is there sufficient coordination and cooperation between ICANN and organizations that have been set up to deal with Internet governance issues beyond ICANN’s remit of technical coordination? Some friction may be caused by a lack of ICANN’s adequate response to emerging challenges and by its failure to benefit from the strengths of its own multi-stakeholder nature. Strained relations with international entities, partly due to the ambitions and power politics of some national authorities or intergovernmental organizations, have  sometimes been aggravated by a poorly calibrated message from ICANN.

Recommendations:

The above concerns that are being expressed, with increasing vigour, from many sources including those who would seek to undermine or even eliminate ICANN. In response, the following recommendations the kind of in-depth change required to enable ICANN adapt to these and other future challenges:

Stakeholders, global relations, partnerships: a necessary overhaul

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• Transform the roles of the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) and At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) from purely advisory to involvement in policy formation. This measure shall not be implemented separately from, nor before, a coordinated reform of structures affecting all Supporting Organizations (SOs) and Advisory Committees (ACs).
• Provide qualified and stable Staff and other resources to ensure a permanent, trustworthy and dynamic relationship with other entities in the Internet ecosphere (IGF, ITU, WIPO, ISOC...). These relationships will not be purely engaged by ICANN staff, but augmented and highlighted by its stakeholders.
• Study the conditions under which Country-code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs) shall be harmonized with ICANN’s general standards.
• Publish ICANN’s appraisal of challenges in the international and institutional fields, and its programme for the coming year in this respect, as a mandatory component of its Strategic Plan.
• In the Board’s Global Relationships Committee (GRC), include one or two non-Board members with experience in international and institutional affairs (e.g. drawn from the ALAC, which arguably assembles the most widespread user experience in the ICANN structures).

Structural changes within ICANN* Make the Board the executive committee of the ICANN community.

• Redirect the fiduciary duty of Directors to the community, not to ICANN itself.
• Improve the articulation between the Board and the CEO: the Board to provide direction and oversight, the CEO to propose, implement, control and report.
• Merge some of the roles of Supporting Organizations (SOs) and Advisory Committees (ACs), along thematic lines (e.g. TLDs, IP allocation, security...).
• Reform the procedures within the Board’s Governance Committee (BGC) to increase transparency, accountability, and freedom from the risk of capture.
• Ensure that ICANN’s default behaviour is for all proceedings, minutes and staff documentation to be open, unless of an expressly confidential nature (i.e. about explicitly determined subjects such as personnel issues or contracts dealing with trade secrets).
• Review the structure, procedures and name of the Nominating Committee.
• Ensure that progress reports by ICANN, including its compliance and enforcement activities, are reviewed by an independent body (self-evaluation by Staff is contrary to the principle of fair assessment).
• Study the extension of the duties of the Ombudsman to include the role of “independent objector” and consideration of “freedom of Information” requests regarding documents deemed confidential.
• Give all due consideration to Conflicts of Interest, and correct any situation where such a conflict, real or perceived, is detrimental to mutual trust and harmful to the public interest. Accepting mere statements of interest while allowing vested interests to influence policy affecting them is inefficient, and harmful to ICANN’s credibility.
• Provide for relevant whistle-blowing (e.g. regarding conflicts of interest), with proper rules protecting both the corporation and prospective whistle-blowers.
• Provide permanent and qualified staff support for each stakeholder group.