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ICANN Stabilizes, Still Faces Hurdles
With the approval last week of a set of agreements setting new ground rules for competition in the domain name registration business, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers finds itself more secure — but still facing some daunting challenges in managing basic aspects of the Internet.
During its fourth meeting of the year in Los Angeles Nov. 1-4, ICANN's board approved a set of agreements that formally opened up to full competition the business of registering top-level domain names, the "addresses" people use to locate specific sites on the Internet. The deal among ICANN, Network Solutions Inc. and the Department of Commerce formally ended the monopoly on the business enjoyed for years by NSI.
At the same time, the agreements settled several sticky disagreements related to the transition to full competition.
"This was a very big deal," said ICANN interim President Mike Roberts. "It brought five years of acrimony…to a halt."
The agreements allow NSI to maintain exclusive control for four years of the registry, the database of the all the top-level domain names that have been registered — those ending in .com, .net and. org. This deal will be extended by an additional four years if NSI sells off either the registry operations or its domain name registration business.
While NSI will likely continue to play a dominant role in the market, the company agreed to come under the same rules set by ICANN under which its new competitors must live. In addition to ending months of sometimes acrimonious negotiations, getting the biggest player in the market to both recognize and provide financial support for ICANN, which had been teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, provides the body with some of the legitimacy it has been lacking, many observers said.
"The measure of stability that results from these agreements is absolutely critical," said Becky Burr, an associate administrator in the Commerce Department's Office of International Affairs. She said the stability the agreements bring to ICANN was necessary before U.S. officials would consider allowing ICANN to tackle on of its key tasks: management of the "root server" system that runs the Internet.
But other hurdles remain. With only half of its future board in place, ICANN must conduct a worldwide outreach effort next year as part of its effort to elect nine at-large board members. The board is currently made up of nine members elected by ICANN's supporting organizations and nine others appointed after the group's creation last year.
At the same, ICANN could have to deal at some point with a brewing controversy concerning the country code top-level domain names, such as .uk or .nz, assigned to individual nations. In addition, some of NSI's competitors have not ruled out possible legal action against the NSI-ICANN-Commerce deal despite efforts to address their concerns with it.
Gaining Respect
Both observers and those involved in the process say ICANN has matured, pointing to its most recent meeting when it managed to defuse — for now — a potential rebellion by NSI's new competitors in the domain name registration business over the ICANN-NSI-Commerce deal. The competitors claimed the deal kept the playing field tilted in NSI's favor.
ICANN "handled it in a much more mature way than a lot of people expected," said Dave Farber, a professor of telecommunications systems at the University of Pennsylvania. "It's a good step."
NSI's competitors came to ICANN's meeting in Los Angeles last week determined to seek changes or delay the deal's implementation. ICANN appeared reluctant to do either one at the start of the four-day meeting, with ICANN lawyer Joe Sims declaring there would be no major changes to the deal.
Still, after being presented with a list of seven changes during a public meeting a day before the board's vote on agreements, some ICANN board members, particularly those who were recently elected to the board, appeared sympathetic to the concerns. NSI and ICANN officials spent the night reaching a compromise.
"This was ICANN's right of passage," said Richard Forman, president of register.com, the first company to begin competing with NSI, following the board's approval of the deal with the changes requested by the registrars. "It's gone from a top-down organization, to a bottom-up organization."
While critics concede that ICANN appeared more responsive than it has in the past, they said both ICANN and NSI had a keen interest in seeing the agreements enacted.
"This particular situation is where we were most likely to see an ICANN shift," said Jonathan Weinberg, a law professor at Wayne State University, who added that the registrars cause was aided by having the support of powerful players such as AT&T.
Even ICANN officials conceded that the registrars helped their own cause by presenting a short and realistic list of demands and offering suggestions on how to address them.
"It helped that the criticism was delivered with constructive solutions, instead of having vague complaints," said ICANN interim chairwoman Esther Dyson.
Lingering challenges
While the changes worked out by NSI and ICANN allowed the agreements to move forward, some registrars say it didn't address their biggest concern relating to NSI's continued control over the registry, and suggested that legal action remains an option.
"To their credit, NSI and ICANN all tried to come up with some Band-Aids," said Matthew Cockman, general council for Nameit.net, one of the competing registrars. "But I still don't believe the fundamental flaws of the agreement have been addressed nor could they have been addressed. I think the biggest problem is that it gives NSI a position in the marketplace guaranteed for eight years, potentially, which in Internet time may as well be perpetuity."
Meanwhile, several observers see potential problems ahead for ICANN in its relationship with the cc-TLD operators. ICANN could be forced to weigh in on a potential conflict between the operators of the ccTLDs and the governments in which they operate.
Weinberg and others say the ccTLD operators want some assurances that ICANN will not arbitrarily redesignate management of a country code to another operator upon a request from a government. At the same time, ICANN runs the risk of angering governments, some of which see the operation of the country codes as a sovereignty issue, Weinberg said.
Roberts said ICANN needs to update its policy relating to the issue and will likely take up the matter next year.
In addition, some ccTLD operators have raised concerns about the share of ICANN's budget that they must pay, which is 35 percent, questioning what they get for that money. The group is considering creating a "peer group" aimed at providing the ccTLDs with more of a voice in ICANN's decisions.
 | - by Juliana Gruenwald |
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