There’s some concern that basic human rights to free expression, privacy, and other civil liberties might be getting pushed too far away from the center of the UN Internet Governance Forum’s (IGF) meeting agenda. The IGF will meet in Hyderabad, India the first week of December this year, and the Secretariat has just published a draft agenda. The agenda is very heavy on security concerns and weak on individual rights protection. A coalition of groups promoting an “Internet bill of rights” has sent a letter to the Secretariat complaining that “rather than promoting positive discussion about how to expand the opportunities that the Internet offers for realizing our fundamental rights and freedoms as enshrined in international law, the title of the main security theme plays on negativity and fear of the Internet.” That letter was endorsed by the civil society Internet Governance Caucus, which IGP participates in.

About ten days ago the US Commerce Department sent ICANN a letter slapping it upside the head for suggesting in its President's Strategy Committee report that the US might actually keep its 1998 promise to turn over root zone file to ICANN/IANA. On August 1, Commerce sent ICANN another letter, warning ICANN that it had better continue to allow unrestricted public access to personal information in the Whois database. Specifically, it made its opposition known to ICANN's proposed legalization of services that offer domain name registrants some shield against the indiscriminate display of their personal data to anyone in the world who wants it. This letter, too, was part of a public comment period on proposed changes in the Registrar Accreditation Agreement. These letter speak to a shift in relations between the USG and ICANN, one that is in some ways encouraging, but also potentially very dangerous as well.   more »

The FBI is soliciting vendor proposals to provide one-stop, turn-key access to Internet Zone files, domain WHOIS and DNS records. Posted July 22, with responses due yesterday, the solicitation details a system that would aggregate the data and provide it to the FBI for up to the next 5 years. On one hand, the open nature of the DNS makes this request mostly just a large data collection exercise, but it has some interesting wrinkles with respect to its scope and selection process, as well as implications for civil liberties.   more »

Alexa Raad, CEO of Public Interest Registry, and Dr. Milton Mueller, Professor and Chair of the Noncommercial Users Constituency, released a joint statement on Internationalized domain names (IDNs) today. In a letter to ICANN's CEO Paul Twomey, Raad and Mueller expressed concerns about the potential for governments to link non-ASCII script domain names to policies that restrict or control Internet access. "The deployment of Internationalized Domain Names (“IDN”) should be seen as a technical measure to allow for multi-lingual use of the internet, and not used as a tool by governments to control access, impose censorship or limit freedom of expression online," the statement read. Click "read more" to see the full statement.   more »

Does who signs the IGF invitation mean a change in priority? That the invitation to IGF 2008 was signed by the USG-DESA does not reflect more than a change in protocol and may reflect a greater institutional commitment by the UN to Internet governance issues.   more »

The small working group created at the Paris meeting has come to an agreement about the voting distribution in ICANN’s policy making Council for domain names (the GNSO Council). It remains to the ICANN Board and staff to accept and implement this proposal, but the Board is expected to follow the consensus of the working group. (If it does not, you will hear about it here!)

The proposed solution is a victory for civil society representation. The new structure is bicameral and involves two distinct voting “houses,” one for the domain name industry that holds ICANN contracts (registries and registrars) and one for users or non-contracting parties (commercial and noncommercial users). In the user house there is an even number of votes for commercial and noncommercial stakeholders. IGP’s Milton Mueller participated in the working group as the representative of the Noncommercial Users Constituency (NCUC).   more »

ICANN has made major strides towards increasing its transparency, but the point about openness and transparency is that you do it all the time, not just when its convenient or when the results won't challenge you. In that regard we find it interesting that ICM Registry's precedent-setting call for an Independent Review Panel has not seen the light anywhere on ICANN's website. ICM Registry, you will recall, was the applicant for the .xxx TLD, and due to interference by governments and some spinelessness by ICANN management ICANN's approval was reversed. ICM has chosen to become the first entity in history to attempt to use ICANN's Independent Review Process, something that ICANN touts as being a safeguard of its accountability but which some independent experts see as somewhat biased against the challenger. Sure, we don't expect ICANN to make a big deal about the challenge but we do think that its correspondence section, which contains virtually everyting sent to ICANN now, should post the notice of the IRP from the ICM Registry and that its ongoing front page news section should mention it.

Abstract: We are running out of Internet addresses. A newly released paper by the IGP evaluates address transfer policies that Internet governance agencies are considering as a response to the depletion of the IPv4 address space. The paper focuses on proposals to allow organizations holding IPv4 addresses to sell address blocks to other organizations willing to buy them. This paper analyzes the economics of the proposed transfer policies, and conducts a systematic comparison of the policies proposed in the three main world Internet regions.   more »

Some critics argue that a transfer market would slow down or harm the transition to IPv6. A transfer market, they say, might encourage organizations to consider purchasing more IPv4 addresses instead of firmly committing themselves to an IPv6 migration strategy. Note that this argument implicitly concedes that a transfer market would work. In this fourth installment we consider the effect of transfer markets on incentives to migrate to IPv6.    more »

At its Paris Board meeting two weeks ago, as ICANN passed its policy authorizing the creation of new generic top level domains, GAC spokesperson Janis Karklins expressed the governments’ concerns that not enough attention had been paid to promoting competition in the formulation of the policy. A reasonable and good sentiment, that. But wait: hasn’t the GAC also been insisting that existing country code top level domain monopolies be given new TLDs in any language scripts of their choosing? And didn’t GAC members also advocate that these new “internationalized” top level domains be handed to the incumbent ccTLD monopolies without being attached to any ICANN contract? Isn't this the same Janis Karklins who said in the same meeting that ccTLDs should get new multilingual TLDs “without any compulsory financial arrangements?” What kind of a competition policy is that?   more »

To the credit of the RIRs and their associated communities, the problem of IPv4 address depletion has led to some innovative policy proposals. Each of the three largest RIRs is considering proposals to permit market-based address transfers. In this third installment we conduct a systematic analysis of the proposals according to five key dimensions: 1) Trigger Date; 2) Territorial restrictions; 3) Eligibility restrictions/speculation controls; 4) Fees; and 5) Route Aggregation.   more »

In the second installment of our analysis of how we are running out of IPv4 addresses, we examine how Regional Internet Registries allocate IPv4 addresses. Despite the appealing ideology of common resource stewardship that appears to underlay RIR policies, there are major failings in the application of the common pool model to IP address resources. Notably, appropriation from the common pool is not based on a simple and uniformly applicable appropriation limit, but on expensive case-by-case administrative procedures in which a central planner tries to determine whether organizations "need" addresses. Worse, when IP addresses are not used by those to whom they have been allocated, they do not automatically return into the common pool for use by others. Those who have been allocated or assigned address resources retain exclusivity over an address block regardless of whether they are using the resources. Given the major imperfections in the application of the common pool model, it is not surprising to discover large amounts of unused and wasted resources, misappropriation and underground transfers taking place.   more »

What happens when the Internet addresses run out? That question has been generating growing concern among Internet operators and policy analysts. The problem is fundamental to the future of the Internet. This blog post is part of a paper that evaluates a transitional policy that Internet governance agencies are considering as a response to the depletion of the IPv4 address space. In particular, it focuses on proposals to allow organizations holding IPv4 addresses to sell address blocks to other organizations willing to buy them. IP address transfer markets, as they are called, have been proposed as a pragmatic way to extend the life of the legacy IP address space.   more »

ICANN claims incessantly to be an open, fair policy making venue based on "bottom up" participation. At the ICANN meeting in Paris, the organization came face to face with the prospect of making good that claim, and it....delayed. Over the next month, we will see how that issue is resolved. The results will be very revealing, a window into the organizations' soul.

It started out well. An impartial review of ICANN's Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), the part of ICANN that initiates domain name policies, by the London School of Economics said that ICANN needed to rebalance representation and improve GNSO processes. A Board Governance Committee followed up on its recommendations, issuing a detailed proposal for reform. At its Paris meeting, the ICANN Board passed most of those recommendations, but it could not resolve the most contentious issue, which centered on how many votes different interest groups get on the central Council that acts as a gatekeeper to the policy making process.

ICANN’s Board Governance Committee set out a proposal for four constituencies (Registrars, Registries, Commercial Users and Noncommercial users) to get 4 votes each, with 3 additional Councilors appointed by a Nominating Committee to act as independent tiebreakers. Some Board members, however, did not want to give commercial and noncommercial interests the same amount of votes. Ignoring the roots of the Internet in educational and scientific institutions, they proposed giving Commercial users 5 votes and Noncommercial users only 3 votes. Apparently these Board members believe that only business interests such as trademark owners and multinational corporations have any interests and rights to protect in domain name policy. If their favored voting distribution was passed, it would guarantee that the two Board members sent to the Board by the GNSO would be domain name supply industry representatives, or possibly intellectual property advocates. It would continue to make policy successes impossible for civil liberties advocates, ordinary home users, small-scale domain name registrants, nonoprofit organizations, universities and researchers, as their representatives could always be ignored and outvoted by larger commercial interests.

However, an interesting counter-alliance developed. Reflecting longstanding frustrations that ICANN is dominated too much by the domain name registration industry it purports to self-govern, an unusual alliance of business users, noncommercial users and ALAC proposed a voting distribution weighted toward users. A “joint users proposal” proposed to give Commercial users 6 votes, Noncommercial users 6 votes and the Contracting Parties, combining registries and registrars, 6 votes as well.

In the end the Board refused to choose either of these alternatives. It threw the issue back to the constituencies themselves, creating yet another new Working Group and giving them a month to come to an agreement on the vote distribution. The WG has been dubbed the “Consensus Working Group by ICANN staff; one cannot tell whether this is meant to be optimistic, sarcastic, or insane.

User interests in ICANN, centered in NCUC and ALAC, have vowed that there must be parity between commercial and noncommercial representation on the Council. They are prepared to work the U.S. Congress to embarrass ICANN should it expose itself as a trade group detached from ordinary user interests. Some of the Board members who oppose commercial-noncommercial parity complain that there are not enough noncommercial organizations active in ICANN. That is true, but the reason should be obvious. Noncommercial organizations do not have special, concentrated economic interests in policy outcomes and therefore cannot justify spending tens of thousands of dollars per year on the time and travel it takes to lobby and participate in ICANN processes. Another reason is that when they do participate, noncommercial participants find themselves outvoted and outgunned by professional, full time lobbyists from the supply industry or trademark groups. The current GNSO representational scheme gives commercial users three times as many votes as noncommercial users, and commercial interests generally eight times as many votes as noncommercial interests. Only masochists would flock to such an arrangement. Board members against parity must believe that political representation schemes should favor special, powerful interests and penalize the general public interest, because special interests are always more likely to get involved than the general public. And please explain: How does telling noncommercial organizations that they are “less equal” than commercial organizations encourage more of them to get involved?

Replying to ICANN's draft 2009 Operating Plan and Budget, the Security and Stability Advisory Committee submitted comments last week vying for its piece of the estimated $60 million ICANN revenue pie. But the interesting story is not the dollar amounts requested by SSAC, rather their request for a specific line item for "Management of certificates for the addressing system (RPKI)." This request to put ICANN in the middle of controlling routing security raises many governance issues.   more »

This is the most intensely political ICANN meeting I have ever been in, with the possible exception of Berlin 1999. Part of the cause is the GNSO structural reform, which has the various constituencies snarling at each other about vote distributions. Multilingual domain names, which combines market pressures with geopolitics, adds to the mix. But one of the main causes is the escalating power of ICANN's Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC).

GAC is gradually inserting itself ever more persistently into the so-called bottom-up, nongovernmental policy making process of ICANN. As this happens, the politics of ICANN become ever more high-level and difficult for ordinary Internet users to access. As this happens, some of its more ambitious members of the GAC are chafing at its "Advisory" status. It is evident that many governments have trouble understanding the idea that their role is only to provide advice and guidance to ICANN on matters within their jurisdiction, and that they are (supposed to be) one of many "stakeholder groups." Which goverment has the most trouble here? The answer may surprise you. It is not China or Russia, or some other authoritarian state. Nor is it Brazil or South Africa, or any other state that led the charge against ICANN during WSIS. No, it is the USA.

But fortunately, there are some people within ICANN willing to assert its autonomy and stand up to state pressure. The following dialogue between ICANN's Board Chair Peter Dengate Thrush reveals an unexpectedly stiff spine. In the following exchange, the US GAC representative, Commerce Department's Suzanne Sene, is badgering ICANN's Board about GAC's advice that it do "studies" on Whois - privacy. We repeat the exchange here with only a few excisions. It makes for delightful reading. The Board chair politely but firmly explains to the US government how ICANN -- an organization it set up -- is supposed to work.   more »

A draft of the independent review of the At-Large Advisory Committee to ICANN has recently been published (a summary can be found here). The authors conclude that ALAC has made progress, but due to several factors, has not made any significant contributions. Under the current system, the prohibitive costs associated with active participation ensure that only a select group of people, representing concentrated interests, will ever be able to consistently participate and make significant contributions to the Internet governance process.   more »

[Editor's note: IGP graduate intern Mark Costa, a doctoral student at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies, joins us today as a guest blogger. Mark recently returned from the 2008 National Conference on Media Reform, one of the largest annual gatherings of domestic media advocates in the United States.]

I recently attended the National Conference for Media Reform in order to build bridges between Internet governance and advocates of free speech and media reform.   more »

At the the upcoming Paris meeting of ICANN June 23 - 28 some reforms may be made which could greatly improve ICANN's representative structure. In a nutshell, representation of noncommercial users (public interest groups, NGOs, and individuals of a public interest bent) will be increased from its current 14%, possibly to 25% or one-third. This will also involve a change in the nature of noncommercial interest representation in ICANN.

The NCUC is inviting all civil society organizations with an interest in the Internet and its global governance to be aware of this and take advantage of it. You do not have to go to Paris to participate. They are using online collaboration tools to extend the meeting between the ICANN Noncommercial Users Constituency (NCUC) and the At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) globally. NCUC will be using the Elluminate platform to permit remote participation in the meeting. Attendees will be able to pose questions or participate in the discussion, as well as be able to hear discussions going on in the meeting.   more »

Two US Government contractors and the National Institute of Science and Technology have released a white paper, "Statement of Needed Internet Capability," detailing possible alternatives and considerations for a Trust Anchor Repository (TAR) to support DNSSEC deployment. Importantly, the document highlights policy choices, and raises interesting questions about a Global TAR as a solution for helping secure the DNS and the role of national security interests.   more »