[Infowarrior] - Obama administration joins critics of U.S. nonprofit that oversees Internet

[Richard Forno]

Obama administration joins critics of U.S. nonprofit that oversees Internet
By Ian Shapira
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 28, 2011; 2:12 PM 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/28/AR2011022803719_pf.html

The California nonprofit organization that operates the Internet's levers has always been a target for global heavies like Russia and China that prefer the United Nations in charge of the Web. But these days, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is fending off attacks from a seemingly unlikely opposition: the Obama administration.

The U.S. government, which helped create ICANN in 1998, has been reprimanding the nonprofit to be more accountable to foreign nations, even warning that it must meet certain U.S. recommendations by the summer.

The battle has come at a sensitive time for ICANN, which this year is trying to pull off the biggest expansion of the Web in the Internet's history. This week and later in March, the nonprofit is meeting with foreign governments to debate the controversial launch of new Web suffixes, such as .gay, .god or .nazi. Also, this fall, the nonprofit is trying to keep its federal contract to oversee the Web's master database of addresses - a power that alarms some foreign governments.

"There's a deeper question of how the world is reacting to a small company - even a nonprofit - completely in charge of a key part of the Internet. Is that acceptable? There's no 100 percent comfortable  solution here," said Steve Crocker, ICANN's vice chairman, who lives in Bethesda and is the chief executive of Shinkuro, a technology company.

ICANN quietly wields vast influence over the Web, a power that is unknown to many Americans and elected officials. Some countries worry that the new wave of Web suffixes might be too controversial while others might require companies to spend vast sums of money to protect their online brands and trademarks. (Who gets .merck? The U.S. drug company? Or the German drug company with the same name?).

With some Middle East countries shutting down the Internet within their borders to curb uprisings, the question of who runs the Web is increasingly figuring into global foreign policy debates.

Even in Washington, ICANN is somewhat mysterious to elected officials, according to Nao Matsukata, a senior policy adviser to the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse, a grass-roots organization in Washington. Matsukata's main problem, he said, is trying to explain what ICANN is to people on Capitol Hill. His group has met with more than 50 members of Congress.

"Sometimes, when we're in meetings on the Hill, they're just nodding their heads," said Matsukata, a former senior official to President George W. Bush. "Very few people understand where all these decisions are coming from, and that this is something that impacts us every day of our lives. Someone is determining what is allowed, what is not allowed, and someone is profiting from these things. People rarely look behind the screen and think, 'How does all that happen?' "

This tiny nonprofit can be especially provocative to a trade press that covers its every move, and a rival U.N. agency, the International Telecommunications Union. When the ITU, a 145-year-old U.N. agency of  nearly 200 nations and territories, held its annual meeting in October in Mexico, a Syrian emissary representing Arab states popped off against ICANN as if it were an enemy nation.

"Do not surrender to the ICANN!" yelled Syrian representative Nabil Kisrawi, during one of the conference's sessions, according to a story in the Register, an online publication on Internet governance. "There is even a representative of the ICANN in this room!" Kisrawi said. (Kisrawi recently died.)

Other nations have been mobilizing against ICANN. China has been leading a campaign among dozens of developing nations to lobby the U.N. for oversight over ICANN, according to former and current ICANN officials. And a coalition of former Soviet states, led by a Russian minister, has been pushing the U.N. to obtain veto power over ICANN.

Chris Disspain, a volunteer ICANN committee chairman and Australian domain name executive, said the prospect of governments running the Web would be calamitous. "China, Syria Iran, and Saudi Arabia and number of others have said in meetings they believe ICANN shouldn't be in existence, or be replaced by some U.N. body," he said. "Frankly, that would be a disaster."

Some countries fear that the United States has, at the very least, the appearance of too much power by owning the contract to run the master database of Web addresses.

"One concern is that if the U.S. decides Syria is behaving badly, then they could make all Web sites using Syria's country code domain - .sy - point to freedom of expression sites, for example," said Avri Doria, an ICANN group chairman. "Countries say, how can we subject ourselves to that?"

Crocker, the ICANN board's vice chairman, said the chances of the U.S. tinkering with the master Web database are "nil." ICANN can only request changes to the master database; the U.S. government reviews those decisions; then, the Dulles-based company VeriSign actually executes the change.

ICANN has been recently clashing with the U.S. government's Commerce Department, which worries that other countries might soon lobby en masse for the United Nations to take over instead. Commerce officials prefer a fast-moving private sector organization to run the Web's addressing system; but the government doesn't believe ICANN is listening enough to the international community.

Some ICANN officials worry that, if tensions continue with the Commerce Department, the nonprofit might lose its contract to run the Web's master database. That contract, which the Commerce Department last gave to ICANN in a no-bid process, comes up for renewal this fall. Commerce officials have yet to decide whether they will ask for other organizations to compete for it.

In mid-February, at a technology conference in Colorado, Lawrence Strickling, an assistant secretary in the Commerce Department, put ICANN on notice, declaring it "must act" by June on a set of accountability guidelines made by him and international leaders who will continue to "monitor" it. Strickling warned about the "forces at play" lobbying for the United Nations to run the Web instead.

In an interview, Strickling said he met privately with ICANN's board members at a December meeting in Colombia, where he urged ICANN to be more open to recommendations from foreign nations. "It's not out of hostility ... but I am trying to nudge ICANN to be its best," Strickling said. "It's important that this model have buy-in from other governments in order to support the global growth of the Internet."

But the U.S. government appears wedded to a private-sector organization running the Web - though that might not necessarily be ICANN. If ICANN fails to meet the government's June deadline, Strickling was unclear about whether he would endorse another organization to take over. He said that he was committed only to "making this stakeholder-driven model succeed."

ICANN scored one minor victory in late February. Its advisory body of foreign nations rejected the Obama administrations's proposal that would have required ICANN to make it easier for nations to object to controversial new Web suffixes like .gay or .xxx.

The United States proposed that any country within ICANN's advisory council should be able to recommend killing any new domain name, and if no other country objected to that nation's veto recommendation, then ICANN's board would have to follow suit. ICANN, however, wants those challenges going before three experts guiding the International Chamber of Commerce.

But ICANN's advisory body of foreign nations recently decided that any country's objection will be considered merely non-binding advice to ICANN's board.

Commerce Department officials worry that if foreign governments feel they have no role in the process, they will start ignoring ICANN, blocking Web sites and splitting up the Internet so that only certain domains can be accessed, depending on the country.

Critics, however, say the U.S.'s proposal was hostile to free expression. "The U.S. government was pushing hard to give any country the power to object and have that right be decisive," said Milton Mueller, a Syracuse University professor who has chaired and participated in several groups that developed ICANN policies that would be overridden by the U.S. intervention. "We think they were playing a game of geopolitical game of placating governments."