By Nick Patience
The interim board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) held a special meeting yesterday by phone and altered some of the most controversial parts of its bylaws, including following through with a promise it made in May to reduce the power base of Network Solutions Inc if it did not comply with the board’s wishes, which it claims represent the consensus of opinion in the internet community.
ICANN’s board will be advised on policy issues by three supporting organizations: one each for domain names, protocols and IP addresses. The domain name supporting organization (DNSO) comprises six constituency groups and each one of those is supposed to choose three people to sit on a names council that will effectively run the DNSO. They in turn will choose three members of an extended ICANN board come the fall, as will the other two SOs.
One of the constituencies is the generic top-level domain group, which at present only includes NSI because it controls the gTLD registries for .com, .net, .org and .edu. At the ICANN meeting in Berlin in May ICANN’s interim chair Esther Dyson said the board would ask NSI to only send one representative to the DNSO’s names council, rather than the three to which it is entitled under the ICANN bylaws. She warned at the time that if NSI did not agree to do this, ICANN’s board would change its bylaws to make it happen, which yesterday it did. The board simply removed the word three from the relevant section of the bylaws.
ICANN president Mike Roberts says it was clear in Berlin that mainstream sentiment was that you only get as many members on [the] Names Council as there are members of your constituency when numbers are less than three. He adds, Henceforth [the] gTLD constituency gets one [names council] member until it expands. That expansion will occur when new gTLDs are added, which may happen later this year, but is more likely to happen some time in 2000.
This, although not entirely unexpected, is likely to be highly controversial because ICANN is making changes to bylaws that will have a significant effect on the make-up of the names council before it has an elected board. The nine-member interim board (plus Roberts as president) was chosen last year in an ad-hoc manner by Jon Postel, the now-deceased director of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and his lawyer, Joe Sims of Jones, Day, Reavis & Pogue. Its ability to change its bylaws prior to having a fully elected board is one of the most controversial aspects of ICANN. It on the other hand argues that it is not practical for it to be prevented from changing its own bylaws.
NSI has cited this selection process as one of the reasons why it has refused to recognize ICANN yet, which it is eventually obliged to do under its US government contract. The US government, in the form of the Commerce Department is stuck somewhere in the middle, urging both NSI to recognize ICANN, and ICANN to be more open with its dealings. There will be a full series of meetings culminating in the body’s first open board meeting in Santiago, Chile on from August 24-26.
The other major change the ICANN board made yesterday was a relaxing of its requirement that each of the six constituencies be geographically diverse. Some of the constituency members complained in Berlin that they had tried but failed to get members from beyond the US and Europe. The board has now agreed to suspend the requirement that the three names council representatives from each constituency should be from different geographic regions. So if three people from three different regions cannot be found, they may all come from one region providing the constituency commits to making a greater effort to find suitable people from elsewhere by the time of the next election. As a final caveat, the new bylaw revisions add that no constituency should have more representatives on the names council than there are in the constituency itself.
