By Nick Patience
The Department of Commerce is recommending that the non-profit body that administers the internet domain name system should hold its board meetings in public and stop collecting fees for each domain name registered until it has a board that has been elected.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is only just over six months old, but some in the internet community are already calling for its dismantling and these ideas are designed to respond to some of their misgivings. Commerce wants ICANN to succeed as it will be an embarrassment if the body it anointed last November fails, but it is obviously mindful of the growing discontent with ICANN in some quarters.
Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) made the recommendations in a response to pointed questions posed by the chairman of the House Commerce Committee, Tom Bliley on June 22. Esther Dyson, the interim chair of ICANN also responded with some equally pointed answers, but the NTIA’s response comes as something of a surprise as it has until now been highly supportive of the way ICANN is operating.
However, the NTIA is also critical of Network Solutions Inc’s role and is asking it publicly to recognize ICANN, which it is obligated to do as part of its contract with the US government. We believe all parties should put aside inflammatory rhetoric, set aside parochial concerns, and work for a fair solution that is in the interest of the entire internet community, says the NTIA.
The current interim board comprises nine members, plus the president and the full board will have 19 members, nine of which will be chosen by ICANN’s three supporting organizations and the other nine being elected by some sort of membership, which is not in place yet. The interim board was largely handpicked by the director of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), the functions of which have since been subsumed into ICANN. Jon Postel, the IANA director, died in mid-October, just as ICANN was being assembled.
The NTIA believes that ICANN should stop collecting the $1 fee on domain name registrations until the first nine members are chosen, which should happen by November. The NTIA is calling for elections for the other nine board members by June 2000 at the latest, which is earlier than ICANN’s bylaws say they must be elected. ICANN should also have a contractual obligation to restrict its policy decisions to goals set out in the government’s white paper of June 1998, says the NTIA.
Many board members have expressed their reluctance to hold board meetings in public and presently, ICANN holds a public meeting the day before its closed board meetings, the next series of which is scheduled for August 24-26 in Santiago, Chile.
Dyson has been breaking out her notepaper quite a lot recently, having penned a letter to Ralph Nader’s Consumer Project on Technology (CPT) organization in mid-June. And like that letter, which marked a watershed in the politics of ICANN, NSI’s name pops up numerous times and criticism of the Herndon, Virginia company is a recurring theme throughout the 20-page document ICANN submitted to Bliley’s committee. Relations between ICANN and NSI are at their lowest point now, but there still appears to be room for them to get even worse.
In her five-page cover letter Dyson claims that ICANN represents a new approach to administration as it is non-governmental, private-sector policy-making that is open and transparent, bottom-up, consensus-based, and global in scope. She emphasizes that ICANN is a consensus-driven body that only exists inasmuch as it has the consensus of the internet community – that loosely defined term that can ring-fence anything from 50 to 50 million individuals depending on who you ask. Thus, the only ‘authority’ that ICANN will ever have is its attractiveness to members of the internet community as a device for development, articulation and implementation of community consensus, she says.
Getting into the thick of the document, Bliley asked about the so-called $1 tax that ICANN requires registrars to pay it for every name they register. Dyson says it has not ‘imposed’ any fee. Rather, it is a set of contractual arrangements with the registrars that they knew about when they signed it. Like most things in life, it all comes down to money. If ICANN could figure out a better way of operating while recovering its costs, it would do so. But it’s the best solution it can find at the moment, says Dyson in the document.
The unwillingness of NSI to sign a registrar accreditation agreement up to this point is another reason why ICANN says it is short of money. Various reports early last week said that ICANN was down to its last $100,000 or so and many of its bills have been left unpaid. If NSI was an accredited registrar, then all its registrations would generate money for ICANN, which is, of course one of the reasons that it isn’t an accredited registrar. Dyson says ICANN’s proposed formula for recovering its costs was posted for public comment earlier this year and generated very little comment, and even less opposition, either in principle or on the details.
Dyson says that to date ICANN has received $421,510 in donations and about $110,000 in accreditation and application fees from registrars. Its $1 per name fee came into force on July 1 and is expected to be its major revenue earner going forward. As the NTIA’s recommendation will obviously mean ICANN having even less money, it says it will work together with ICANN to raise more money from donations to tide it over until the fee could be reintroduced.
There has been a lot of talk also about NSI having its business taken away from it if ICANN should revoke a registrar agreement, should it ever sign one and Bliley asked about it in one of his questions. Dyson says ICANN has no statutory or regulatory ‘authority’ of any kind, and that includes the perceived authority to terminate NSI or any other company’s authority to register domain names. And if the committee has been told it has that authority, then the committee has been misinformed, she says. However, it should be noted that NSI and the other registrars do have to sign the accreditation agreement to register names, but that requirement, flows directly from NSI’s own agreement with the USG, says Dyson. NSI has managed to continue registering names because it controls the registry of domain names under a contract with the US government that expires on September 30, 2000.
Bliley asked if ICANN directors were compensated in any way. Dyson replies that only Mike Roberts, the president is paid directly for his services. He is employed on a month-by-month- basis for $18,000 per month, which goes to the consultancy in which his family has a majority stake. However, the other directors, rather than being compensated, are actually out of pocket due to their work for ICANN, and as such are an important source of funding for the body at the moment, claims Dyson.
The lack of funds also affects the organization’s ability to implement a membership scheme, which Bliley also asked about. Dyson says the lack of funds is preventing it from conducting the kind of outreach that such a scheme would require. On the question of open board meeting, Dyson sidesteps the question by pointing out that the Commerce Committee itself would find its work very difficult if it was precluded from having any private discussions, which is not really an answer to why its board meeting, where the key decisions are made (Dyson says at one point that ICANN doesn’t make decisions, it merely recognizes community consensus) are closed to the public.
Details of all correspondence ICANN has had with the US government, as well as registrar agreements and the like were being sent under separate cover and the Committee gave ICANN until today, July 12 to supply those documents. Congressional hearings are expected towards the end of this month, although staff at the committee said Friday that hearings are only a possibility at this stage.
