By Nick Patience

The reality often has more texture than the expectations, said Esther Dyson, speaking to us at the conclusion of Saturday’s inaugural public meeting of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). That texture took the form of heckling from the audience of about 200, through calls for the board to resign en masse to loud applause and support for the manner in which ICANN is evolving into the body most likely to take control of the internet’s infrastructure. The US Department of Commerce is expected to formalize the arrangement with a cooperative agreement in the next few weeks. But before that happens, ICANN has to be seen, at least, to be trying to garner support from the worldwide internet community. Saturday’s meeting, held at the Cambridge Marriott, just outside Boston, Massachusetts, was the first example of that process and will be followed by a meetings in Brussels on November 25 and more in Asia and Africa in the coming weeks and months. The meeting was organized by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. As Dyson, chairman of the interim board of nine board members put it at the start of the meeting, ICANN is trying to get support so we can act as quickly as possible, but not hastily. She added that ICANN is almost ready to get its authority from the US government, but needs its legitimacy. And that legitimacy – and more importantly, trust – can only come from support from the internet community at large. The meeting kicked off with questions about where the board members came from in terms of how were they selected and those questions recurred throughout the day from those who did not trust the board because of the apparently closed manner in which it was selected. Of the six board members present in the morning, all but two said they were approached by Joe Sims, ICANN’s lawyer, previously counsel to the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), and its late director Jon Postel. Sims addressed the meeting early in an attempt to clear the air, saying that Postel solicited suggestions for board members within the community and asked him (Sims) to contact those that he selected. Sims said that by the time he had got hold of the board members chosen, all of them had already been contacted by somebody, which included senior IBM Corp executives such as John Patrick and Roger Cochetti (see separate story) and European and Australian government representatives. Mike Roberts, the interim president of ICANN said he was approached by Sims in September and was selected by the board at its first meeting in New York on October 25. An open question and answer session followed the introduction during which many familiar positions were reiterated and a common theme was the lack of trust. Einar Stefferud, internet veteran and interim chair of the Open Root Server Confederation (ORSC), which has contributed amendments to the ICANN proposal to the government, summed up the mood when he advised the board that trust is not transitive; you guys have to earn it and begging is not a good strategy. He added that the bylaws of ICANN are useless if they make you unsueable and unaccountable. The interim ICANN board has agreed to establish some sort of membership structure for ICANN. which was opposed by Postel but advocated by the majority of the internet community as a system of checks and balances on the board’s power. The meeting moved on to debate what kind of membership structure would be appropriate. Suggestions varied from one vote for everybody who has a domain name, through using the Internet Society as the membership base to those who warned that any sort of registration fee would be prohibitive to people in many parts of the world who cannot even afford internet access. Other higher level perspectives were added by Dave Clark of MIT who suggested that the discussion is broken, as it is not yet clear what exactly the body was of which people were to become members. Tamar Frankel, chair of the International Forum on the White Paper (IFWP) meetings through the summer suggested that any membership idea should be interim and flexible so that any proposal could have a dry run. Board member Greg Crew didn’t sound like a man enlightened by what he had just heard and said that the board would establish an advisory committee to come up with membership models, a move which has already been announced by ICANN. Another director, Haans Kraaijenbrink, said the most important act of any membership is the election of the board.

Up in the air

The most contentious issue facing the board is likely to be the formation of the three supporting organization (SO) called for in the ICANN articles of incorporation. The three SOs are supposed to advise the board on policy in the areas of domain name, IP address space and internet protocols. As it stands, the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) is putting itself forward to do the protocol work, a group called the Domain Name Support Organization (DNSO) has sprung up to do the names and the IP address work is still without takers, as far as we can tell. However, none of the groups has any sort of approval and the situation is still very much up in the air. ICANN says it will publish criteria for the SOs by the year-end after which applications will be accepted and published for public scrutiny. Perhaps the most difficult hurdle the board has to overcome is whether or not the SOs should select part of the board. At present, the articles call for each of them to nominate three board members who will be the first ‘official’ board members and will join the nine existing interim board members, who are due to step down between September 30 1999 and September 30 2000. The SOs have to be open membership-based bodies themselves and will develop policy that the board will adopt. With that in mind, the meeting waded into the subject of SOs and it quickly became clear that the waters were pretty muddy. Among the issues raised were if the SOs have the same members as ICANN itself, there would be no balance of power and that there used to be an SO for users in earlier drafts – Roberts said that issue is back on the table now. While the technical community seems to be taking the lead in forming the SOs many also pointed out that its issues will be largely political in nature, such as the allocation of blocks of valuable IP address space. The last subject addressed by the meeting was that of transparency and openness of ICANN’s operations and it revealed perhaps the greatest gulf between the board, comprised of mostly retired high-tech and telecommunications executives, and the audience of internet users, both commercial and non-commercial. Moderated by Harvard law professor Charles Nessun, the discussion was fairly esoteric as he offered questions to the board such as: How do you measure transparency? and How comfortable do you feel about operating in the open? Esoteric they may have been, but they made the board feel uncomfortable. To the first question director George Conrades merely said that the existing bylaws provide for transparency; Frank Fitzsimmons suggested doing a survey and Dyson invoked her experience of Russia – as how not to do it. She said that publishing minutes alone is not enough – frankly, they’re embarrassing – and acknowledged the need for the board to make explicit things that our lawyers would like to keep implicit. Suggestions were made for an ombudsman; someone not on the board to hear complaints about the board. Towards the end of the session the question of voting records came up. Dyson said the board had decided against revealing its voting records, and while board members were asked where they stood on this issue, only Crew revealed that he voted that against revealing records, while the others stayed mute. Many questioned the ability of an electorate of ICANN members to choose board members if they did not know their voting record. Bodies such as the US Supreme Court and Federal Reserve Board reveal their members’ voting records, so why not ICANN, the audience asked? Dyson said afterwards she would not have a problem with such a move. As for holding its board meetings in public, as many in the audience suggested, that got an even frostier reception from the board. Kraaijenbrink said he opposed live webcasts of the meetings as they would in fact lead to less openness as board members would be forced to talk in private. IBM’s internet technology program director Mike Nelson, in the audience but intimately involved in fund-raising for ICANN, suggested that webcasting was too expensive. That prompted lawyer and engineer Karl Auerbach to brandish his credit card and offer pay for the necessary equipment himself. If there was one moment on Saturday that summed up the gulf that needs to bridged between the internet community and the board for ICANN, that was it. It should be noted that many of the problems of the board’s lack of openness it inherited from Postel’s bypassing of the IFWP and his behind-the-scenes selection process. It seems to us that there is a fundamental lack of trust in the board as a whole at the moment, although individual members – in particular Dyson – seemed to win many over. Roberts acknowledged to us afterwards that we have to earn our trust. The board’s actions over the next six months, in particular in the SO area, will determine whether or not ICANN will get the legitimacy it craves. However, despite all the fine words from the US government, it seems ICANN will receive its contract well before such legitimacy is achieved. But a few well-placed public relations moves such as disclosing the board member’s voting records would at least set the ball rolling down the road to trust. There is a very long way to go on that issue and if ICANN gets it wrong, no doubt many lawsuits will hinder its path. ICANN’s web site at http://www.icann.org should be up any day now and the archives of the meeting are at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu.