Officials on Thursday sought to assure House members that the Internet will not be subject to control by governments around the world if the United States completes a planned transition of a vital component to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, an international body.
“The mission of ICANN has been clarified to be quite technical in nature,” insisted David Gross, a former U.S. ambassador and telecom lawyer. “The opportunity for much of the mischief that we have all collectively been concerned about, [such as] going and doing things beyond its formal remit, and being encouraged to do so by governments and by others, [is] less.”
He made the comments before a panel of the House Energy and Commerce Committee during a hearing to review the transfer of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which is responsible for ensuring that domain names on the Web remain operable.
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Alissa Cooper, the head of the group leading the transition, argued that work was trivial, and that it was being performed by just a handful of people. “They are essentially clerical functions … maintaining values in databases on websites.”
“It’s a team of 13 people who perform secretarial functions, so you could imagine other organizations would be able to carry out the task,” Cooper added, responding to a question about whether organizations could perform the same work.
The executive director of NetChoice, a coalition of e-commerce companies like Facebook and Google, assured members that governments were “very upset” with the plan and the checks it would place on their power.
“Governments were very upset at the solution the [Internet] community came up with,” Steve DelBianco said, in reference to the advisory groups that comprise ICANN. He said that for governments to enjoy privileged advice to ICANN’s board, it would need to be adopted “with broad support in the absence of a single formal objection.”
“The second thing we did was suggest that they had to attach rationale to their advice, and ICANN’s board, should it choose to reject that advice, would only need to enter into a conversation of trying to reach a mutually acceptable solution, but they wouldn’t actually need to reach one,” DelBianco said.
He added that the community was going to reserve the power to initiate an independent review process “that could block and undo advice that came from governments,” in the event ICANN’s board accepts it in a manner they deem untoward.
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ICANN voted last week to approve the transfer plan. The Department of Commerce is now conducting its own 90-day review. The Obama administration has sought to complete the process for several years, but was impeded by concerns from Congress that have largely receded.
