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 »

Public Interest Registry wants to implement DNSSEC in the .org zone. According to ICANN's regulations, this is a "new registry service" and it has to be reviewed by a committee of technical experts to assess its impact on the security and stability of the Internet before it can be approved. The expert panel released its report on PIR's proposal June 4. The report, like so many things associated with DNSSEC implementation, has fascinating implications which are buried in technical details that few people will understand. One conclusion that could be drawn from the report is that the US government's insistence on maintaining control of the root zone file is actually decreasing Internet security.   more »

Initiated in spring 2006 in conjunction with the UN Internet Governance Forum, the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet) is hosting several events this year, including an upcoming international workshop on "Global Internet Governance: An Interdisciplinary Research Field in Construction" in Paris, 23 June 2008, from 08:30 to 13:30, concurrent with the ICANN-Paris meeting. [invitation-fr] [invitation-en]

The purpose of the workshop, the first of its sort, is to allow scholars involved in Internet Governance related research to describe their ongoing research projects to other scholars in the field, in order to share ideas, forge possible collaborations, and identify emerging research themes in the field. Scholars from various academic disciplines and all regions of the world are expected to contribute to this reflexive exercise, with the long-term objective of collectively building this interdisciplinary research field.   more »

This is a book about Internet governance, despite the fact that the author refuses to use that term and, near the end of the book, rather testily distances himself from the Internet Governance Forum and related attempts to develop and reform global Internet governance. Despite that, the book is a well-researched and well-constructed analysis of the architectural issues underlying some of the policy problems (and opportunities) facing the Internet. It is worth reading – and worth critiquing – for the debate will shed light on some of the key choices we have to make regarding the governance of the Internet. Although Zittrain inevitably couches his argument in terms of technical architecture, “tools” and “code,” the problems the book raises are often more political than technical. His analysis suffers a bit from the lack of a more sustained and self-conscious engagement with the political, international and institutional aspects of Internet governance. This blog post conducts a full review.   more »

The OCED has officially released the "Economics Of Malware: Security Decisions, Incentives and Externalities" a study co-authored by IGP Scientific Committee member Michel van Eeten and Johannes Bauer. From the paper:

Malicious software, or malware for short, has become a critical security threat to all who rely on the Internet for their daily business, whether they are large organisations or home users. While originating in criminal behaviour, the magnitude and impact of the malware threat are also influenced by the decisions and behaviour of legitimate market players such as Internet Service Providers (ISPs), software vendors, e-commerce companies, hardware manufacturers, registrars and, last but not least, end users. This working paper reports on qualitative empirical research into the incentives of market players when dealing with malware. The results indicate a number of market-based incentive mechanisms that contribute to enhanced security but also other instances in which decentralised actions may lead to sub-optimal outcomes - i.e. where significant externalities emerge.

The study is referenced extensively in the Ministerial Background Report, "Malicious Software (Malware): A Security Threat to the Internet Economy", that was prepared for the upcoming OECD Ministerial meeting to be held in Seoul, Korea Jun 17-18 on the “Future of the Internet Economy”. The Background Report is being used to inform policymakers, including civil society, governments and the private sector, "about the evolution and impact of malware, as well as the counter-measures being taken. It concludes with suggestions for greater co-operation across the various international communities addressing malware."