Members of Congress have said the plan to give up control of certain Internet functions could give authoritarian regimes too much power, but so far at least, members of the public don’t seem too concerned.
The plan is to move the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority from U.S. to international control, and the IANA’s public-private Transition Coordination Group asked for comment on its 199-page plan back in July. But as of Aug. 14, the ICG had only received 14 responses, mostly a scattered group of individuals.
It’s still possible, however, that a rush of comments are submitted toward the end of the comment period, which ends Sept. 8.
The comments posted to the ICG’s website are intended to let respondents say whether they believe the proposal to transfer the IANA’s functions from U.S. control to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, “maintains the openness of the Internet” or whether it will result in a model that is more “government-led.”
Since 1998, the IANA has been administered under contract by the Department of Commerce. The IANA is responsible for managing domain names and numbers worldwide, or the process by which an Internet Protocol (IP) assignment is interpreted as an address on the Internet.
The plan, which has been in the works since early 2014, has raised concerns from members of Congress who fear allowing foreign entities to control the administrative agency. Those members have been trying to pass the DOTCOM Act, which would give Congress the right to approve any such deal, for more than a year.
The legislation passed the House in 2014, but didn’t make it to a vote in the Senate. Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., pointed to the controls that some foreign governments placed on the Internet as an example of why Congress should oversee the deal, and made specific reference to the Turkish government’s decision to block access to Twitter and YouTube prior to an election.
“Make no mistake about it, as recently as a week ago, we saw a foreign government turn off Twitter and YouTube ahead of an election in an effort to silence that government’s critics,” Walden said at the time. “We know what China has done to silence dissent, and we’ve read the statements of Vladimir Putin … These threats are real.”
In reference to countries like Russia and China, one of the fourteen individuals who submitted a public comment asked, “How will the Internet remain open and free when it is under the control of many who do not believe in freedom and openness?”
However, the leader of the transition, ICG President Alissa Cooper, says that the functions of the IANA are mostly technical in nature. “The IANA functions are administrative functions,” Cooper said in comments to the Washington Examiner. “They involve maintaining and publishing values in registries. They are important for the continued smooth functioning of the Internet, but they are clerical in nature.”
Additionally, the proposed multi-stakeholder model would not allow for the level of control that some foreign governments have advocated. It would not, for instance, place the IANA under the control of the United Nations.
Brett Schaefer, a Senior Research Fellow in International Regulatory Affairs for the conservative Heritage Foundation, says that while the plan is not perfect, it prevents direct government regulation of IANA functions. “By far the better option is to put the private sector (business, civil society, internet industry) in the driver’s seat, because they have a direct interest in ensuring that the Internet remains free, resilient, stable and secure,” Schaefer said.
Jim Harper, a senior fellow in cybersecurity and telecommunications at the libertarian Cato Institute, generally concurs. “It carries some risks to Internet freedom, but having these functions under (attenuated) U.S. control creates risks to Internet freedom, too,” Harper says. “On balance, I don’t think the risks are significant.”
If the plan is approved, the earliest it could go into effect is mid-2016, according to Cooper.
“The ICG has estimated that at a minimum three to four months will be required to complete the transition after the proposal is approved by the U.S. government, which would imply that at the earliest the transition could be completed in the July 2016 time frame,” Cooper told the Examiner.
Cooper also remains optimistic that more people will submit their input before the open comment period comes to a close.
“With the bulk of the public comment period still ahead of us, we certainly expect to receive many comments up to the deadline,” she concluded.
