ITU taking over ICANN?

October 21st, 2002
By Kevin J. Delaney

PARIS -- Even advocates of private-sector management of key Internet resources describe the experience to date as disappointing, while some term it an outright failure. But as the body known as Icann tries to debug its oversight of the Internet addressing system, an actor with global government ties is stepping into the fray.

The woes of the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers, anointed by the U.S. Department of Commerce to oversee the day-to-day working of that addressing system, have opened the way for involvement by the International Telecommunication Union, a Geneva-based treaty organization affiliated with the United Nations. Last week, at the end of the ITU's monthlong summit in Marrakesh, Morocco, members voted that the organization should play an active role in "discussions and initiatives" related to the Internet names and numbers system. That system is the equivalent of the phone directory and addressing schema used for swapping data around the Internet, from the lowly e-mail to a Web page to the pirated mp3 music file.

The bottom line is that the ITU is seeking to establish itself as the place where public-policy questions related to the Internet names and numbers are addressed.

The U.S. government and tech community have traditionally opposed the ITU's involvement. Its structure makes for painfully slow decision making, and the organization is dominated by the big telephone companies, they have argued. Its critics point out that ITU policies require governments' sign off, something the Internet community sought to avoid. Today, a number of U.S. Internet players state that the ITU's promise of help to Icann is a ploy to wrest away broader control of Internet management.

The ITU says that's not the case. But just the prospect of its involvement raises business and economic questions that reverberate beyond the Internet community.

On the face of it, there is the fate of the domain-name industry that Icann oversees, estimated at about $2.5 billion. That money comes from fees individuals and companies pay for the right to use a domain. The ITU's critics say consumers could suffer if responsibility shifted toward the ITU, since it has traditionally been hard for individuals and advocacy groups to gain access to the ITU's proceedings and decision-making processes. The ITU, for its part, stresses its commitment to change that.

In addition, there is the basic issue of control over anyone who might register a domain name. The revocation of a domain could have deep commercial consequences, in the short term, at least: Amazon.com, for example, depends on consumers knowing that Web address to sell its goods. It is conceivable that governments could threaten such action to strong-arm businesses to accept other policies, such as local taxation of electronic commerce. Their decisions in this area could also have ramifications for trademark protection.

"Taking away someone's domain name is a convenient point of leverage for enforcing regulation," says Milton Mueller, an associate professor at Syracuse University and expert on Internet governance.

Given the ITU's government membership, some Internet experts fret that it could be used to force local regulations on the Internet. That concern is accompanied by the observation that the four countries controlling about 80% of the Internet infrastructure could find themselves with an equal vote as everybody else in such deliberations, subject to the whims of those with less at stake.

In truth, governments already try to exercise some control over Internet content. One example is a French court's rulings last year ordering Yahoo Inc., San Jose, Calif., to prevent French residents from accessing auctions of Nazi paraphernalia on its U.S. site.

Given the state of the Icann experiment, some people have concluded that private-sector management of the Internet simply doesn't work.

Their argument is that such an organization doesn't have the clout or funding for the task. Icann's critics say it squanders time and money while failing to address pressing matters such as the stability of the Internet amid security threats and the financial woes of key service providers.

Icann, which declined to comment, seems to share that view at least partially the view that governments need to get involved at all. "It is now clear that a purely private-sector body cannot effectively carry out the Icann mission," the California-based nonprofit's reform committee wrote in its final report this month.

Others argue that Icann's failings say more about its own structure and administrators rather than the idea of private-sector Internet management.

A number of Icann critics and supporters suggest clearly defining the split between technical and policy regulation and leaving Icann with a narrower, technical focus. National governments, potentially through an organization like the ITU, could handle matters of public policy.

That is something the ITU puts forth in its Marrakesh resolution, citing "stability, security, freedom of use, protection of individual rights, sovereignty, competition rules, and equal access for all" as key public-policy issues.

It's not clear how workable that might be, given that technical matters often willingly or not define policy. At the moment, there are more questions than answers surrounding the issues.

"If they [at the ITU] strongly argue governments and only governments can make policy, we would likely see an increase in enforceable global regulations," says David Johnson, who teaches a class on Internet governance at Yale Law School. "If they surprise skeptics by taking the approach of saying we're committed to private-sector coordination rather than top-down regulation, they might turn out to be the friend of competition and decentralized decision making."