May 8, 2006 – Page 1218
Last fall, there was a big scare that the United Nations was trying to seize the Internet’s Web addressing system from a U.S.-controlled nonprofit, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.
That threat remains — especially because ICANN’s authority under the Department of Commerce expires Sept. 30, right before a meeting of a new U.N.-based Internet Governance Forum. Either of those events could put an end to the organization’s hegemony over managing the so-called domain name system (.com, .edu, .gov, .net and the like). The U.N. forum, for example, will begin with the proposition that “no nation” should have power over doling out Web addresses in another’s top-level domain (such as .uk, .de, etc.).
But the group is also under attack in the United States by the very companies that finance its operations. Internet “registrars” — those small vendors who will lease you a Web address, if it isn’t already taken — are upset with a settlement ICANN reached in February with Verisign Inc., a publicly traded company it had under contract to manage the universe of “.com” Web addresses that registrars then sell to business owners.
ICANN’s troubles began in 2003 when it barred Verisign from offering an enhanced service called SiteFinder along with its .com addresses. Verisign wanted the additional revenue from SiteFinder; ICANN felt Verisign should remain a pure postmaster for .com Web addresses and leave such enhancements to other providers. Verisign sued. After two years of litigation, the organization, eager to focus on the U.N. problem, agreed to give Verisign a perpetual right to the .com domain and permission to raise prices on registrars as much as 7 percent annually for the next four years. Verisign, however, will need the nonprofit’s approval whenever it seeks to get into a new line of business related to its .com duties.
Registrars, such as GoDaddy.com, are howling in protest. How dare ICANN, they ask, make Verisign their sole and perpetual source of .com Web addresses at fixed prices? Lawmakers, including Sen.
All of which raises a question that has dogged ICANN since its inception: Is it merely an impartial technical standards group — or a regulator with an agenda to protect the Web from the marketplace?
“ICANN has specific responsibility for allocation of blocks of Internet addresses,” says its chairman,Vinton G. Cerf, a top Google Inc. executive whose role as one of the founding pioneers of the Internet gives him a Gandalf-like respectability. “I don’t want it to expand its role. It’s hard enough to do what it does.”
But critics in the tech sector say the settlement is only the latest example of the organization’s paternalistic — some say socialistic — attitude about the Internet. The organization’s board members, they say, believe that only they know what’s best for the Web.
“ICANN is out of touch,” said one entrepreneur who helped launch one of the early top-level domain registries, only to be blocked by the group from selling security and anti-spam features along with the domain’s addresses. “They’re holding the Internet back because of their tight control over the registries.”
Some even blame ICANN for making problems such as spam, phishing (fake Web sites that steal your identity) and viruses worse, by barring registries from blocking those evils at the address level rather than letting them course through the Web to individual computers.
The idea of using words, rather than just numbers, to identify computers on a network emerged with the commercial Web in the mid-1980s. The National Science Foundation took over Web address directories in 1991 but two years later decided that, since such addresses had value in the marketplace, a private company should provide domain registration services. NSF signed a five-year contract with Network Solutions Inc., which later was bought by Verisign.
By 1998, the Clinton administration wanted government to back off further, so ICANN, based in Southern California and subjected to Commerce Department oversight, was born.
Today, the best one can say about ICANN is that, despite its failings, the Internet has grown like crazy and works remarkably well.
But that won’t keep it from being the favorite punching bag of the global tech sector. Foreign governments say it’s merely a proxy for the U.S. government and wields unfair control over their nations’ address schemes. U.S. critics say it’s an ungainly choke point — pompously bureaucratic, slow and opaque in its decision making — on the otherwise freewheeling Web. Then there are the complaints that the organization stifles innovation and competition.
In the next few weeks, the Commerce and Justice departments will act on the proposed ICANN-Verisign settlement. Considering the alternative (chaos), they will probably approve it — just as Commerce will probably renew the organization’s mandate in September. Then, in the fall, the U.N. forum will debate replacing the nonprofit with a new, truly global regime for managing Web addresses in every language. If its members take a hard look at how difficult that would be, they’ll most likely decide instead to try to improve the ICANN they’ve got.
Mike Mills is CQ’s executive editor for electronic publishing.