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NARALO Survey-ES.pdf

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

Initial Authors:

• Yrjö Länsipuro
• Evan Leibovitch
• Carlton Samuels
• Jean-Jacques Subrenat
• Hong Xue 薛虹

DRAFT - 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 been able to keep pace with growing public interest requirements, and to adapt its methods to better serve them, or has it remained beholden to the narrow interests of those who, from the outset, were its original most powerful stakeholders (registries, registrars)?

In its pioneering years, ICANN served a public of a few millions, for whom the Internet represented novelty rather than a necessity. The duty to serve the public interest today, at a time when the Internet is an indispensable global facility for 2,3 billion users, takes on an entirely different meaning. As long as the concept of "public interest" remains ambiguous, it is easy for ICANN to pay lip service to it, even though its responses to publicly-identified problems 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) Multistakeholder vs. intergovernmental 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 inter-governmental structures, 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 it.

While defending its multistakeholder dogma, 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. 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:

Are the arrangements for the global governance of the Internet’s critical resources (including ICANN’s internal governance arrangements), as inherited from the pioneering years, still adequate?

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 operation, 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 ICANN to command the respect of the global community affected by its decisions and actions. 

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 are some of the 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 are made to initiate the kind of in-depth change required for ICANN to adapt to these and other future challenges:

Stakeholders, global relations, partnerships: a necessary overhaul

• 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

...