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Many sovereign states first dismissed the Internet and the Domain Name System (DNS) as a marginal, passing phenomenon. Having finally understood their critical importance, some states are now attempting to regain control through specific inter-governmental structures, with potentially damaging consequences to the innovation and development of the Internet, and possibly to its global accessibility and end-to-end functioning as we know it.  ICANN’s value proposition and strength in contrast to any inter-governmental approach, is its multi-stakeholder, bottom-up policy development model.  While defending the benefits of this model, ICANN has neglected to improve it to meet demands, which have grown more differentiated with the expansion of the Internet and the types of its users.  In a decade, ICANN has grown from a small group of closely-connected pioneers to an entity with global responsibilities and worldwide operations.  ICANN’s continuous cycles of internal organizational reviews have failed to identify the substantive changes demanded by this shifting environment.  The proliferation of constituencies 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).   

3) Global governance:

Key Question: Are the arrangements related to the governance of the Internet’s critical resources, including that of ICANN’s own internal governance, adequate to meet the needs of a growing and diverse community of internet users worldwide?

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