Page History

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In its pioneering years, ICANN served a public of a few millions, for whom the Internet represented novelty rather than a necessity. Today, the duty to serve the interests of a greater public -- the billions of people to whom the Internet is an indispensable global facility -- takes on an entirely different meaning. By keeping its own concept of "public interest" ambiguous ICANN has been seen to pay lip service to it, even though its responses to problems identified by its own self-defined At-Large community, and its ability to minimize conflicts of interest and enforce its own regulations have been unsatisfactory. The lack of a clear public-interest engagement strategy, geared to the present and future importance of the Internet to the world, undermines the respect and trust of Internet users towards ICANN. The increasing success of alternatives to the multi-TLD naming paradigm already indicate such erosion of public confidence.

2) The multi-stakeholder model (MSM)

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vs.

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an inter-governmental approach

Is ICANN's so-called multistakeholder approach sustainable in the long run under increased pressure from governments and some inter-governmental organizations?

It is worth noting that many sovereign states first dismissed the Internet and the DNS as a marginal, passing phenomenon. Having finally understood their critical importance, some states are now attempting to regain control through some inter-governmental structuresstructure, with potentially damaging consequences to the innovation and development of the Internet, maybe even to its global accessibility and end-to-end functioning as we now know it.

While defending the benefits of its multistakeholder multi-stakeholder model, ICANN has neglected to develop its content, and to redefine and overhaul the multistakeholder approach to meet demands, which have grown more differentiated with the expansion of the Internet and the types of its uses. In a decade, ICANN has grown from a small group of closely-connected pioneers to an entity with global responsibilities and worldwide operations Yet continuous cycles of internal organizational reviews fail to identify the substantive changes demanded by this shifting environment. Proliferation of constituences and stakeholder groups in the ICANN structure needs to be accompanied by real efforts to achieve and maintain equality and balance among various stakeholder interests. Protections must exist to ensure that consensus procedures can no longer be opaquely circumvented for political expediency. By-laws governing the status and role of stakeholders need to be revised so as to fully engender the informed consent of all ICANN’s components, including sovereign states represented through its Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC).

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When ICANN was set up, the majority of Internet users were in North America and Western Europe. A crucial question now arises: how to evolve these arrangements to meet 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, while preserving the multistakeholder approach and avoiding the pitfalls of inter-govermental solutions?   

Led by example of its own Board's selection methods and operationDespite the creation of publicly-visible efforts such as the "ATRT", ICANN has resisted a complete embrace of transparency, "bottom up process", and elimination of both real and perceived conflicts of interest. This corporate culture is unsustainable in order for if ICANN is to command the respect of the global community affected by its decisions and actions. 

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Some friction may be caused by a the 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.

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Stakeholders, global relations, partnerships: a necessary overhaul

• 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.
• 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 solely 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

• 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).
• 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.
• Remove the CEO from the list of voting Board members to the position of being permanently in attendance, except when the Board decides otherwise.
• 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.