May 2014
30
Telecom
The news that custodianship
of the Internet is to pass out of US hands is
welcome to some; to others, not so much
The 14
th
March announcement by the National Tele-
communications & Information Administration (NTIA) that it
is relinquishing its hold on ICANN marks a dramatic change
for both the US Commerce Department agency and the
Los Angeles-based group that manages the Internet’s
architecture. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers has, since 2000, performed critical back-end web work,
including management of .com and other domain names, under
a contract with Commerce.
The NTIA administrator, Larry Strickling, said that the United
States will give up its Internet oversight role in the Autumn
of 2015, upon expiration of the current contract with ICANN.
The function will thereupon be turned over to an international
group whose structure and administration is to be determined
over the coming year.
The Strickling announcement stoked a controversy that
had been simmering for some time but which blazed up on
15
th
June, 2013.
On that date, rogue National Security Agency employee Edward
Snowden commenced periodic leaks of classi ed material
relating to the NSA’s wide-ranging surveillance programmes.
It would be di cult to overstate the polarising e ect of these
datadumps both in the US and in the wider global sphere.
For some interested parties, notably ICANN, which craves the
status of global organisation out from under US supervision,
the announcement came as unquali ed good news. It also
gladdened European Union o cials, who post-Snowden had
intensi ed their activities in the campaign against the US as
custodian of the Internet.
In February the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm,
issued a call for “a clear timeline” for globalising ICANN and the
duties it performs under the US contract. And here it was.
Joining Mr Strickling in a 14
th
March conference call with the
news site Politico (Arlington, Virginia), ICANN president Fadi
Chehade was in full hail-and-farewell mode. “We thank the
US government for its stewardship, for its guidance over the
years,” he said. “And we thank them today for trusting the global
community to replace their stewardship with the appropriate
accountability mechanisms.”
Questions of security
Those mechanisms are at the core of the opposition view
on the US withdrawal. Some American o cials – concerned
that authoritarian governments might stage a takeover of
the Web and impose online censorship – have warned about
the dangers of ceding ICANN’s authority to the International
Telecommunication Union (ITU), a United Nations agency.
Politico published some early reaction to the announcement:
Daniel Castro, a senior analyst at the Information Technology
and Innovation Foundation, a Washington-based non-
partisan think tank, warned in an op-ed that ICANN would
not be held accountable without US control. He wrote:
“If the Obama Administration gives away its oversight of
the Internet it will be gone forever.”
“Every American should worry about Obama giving up
control of the Internet to an unde ned group,” tweeted
former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a failed presidential
aspirant in 2012. “This is very, very dangerous.”
The response in the US was not uniformly negative. Senate
Commerce Committee chairman Jay Rockefeller hailed
the government’s decision to relinquish oversight of the
Internet’s critical functions, calling it “the next phase” in a
transition to “an independent entity that re ects the broad
diversity of the global Internet community.”
For its part, NTIA denied that its action was taken in response
to the Snowden disclosures, asserting that the relationship
between the Commerce Department and ICANN was always
envisioned as temporary.
Mr Strickling set out a series of principles that must govern
the transition, including the preservation of a free and open
Internet.
As reported by Erin Mershon and Jessica Meyers of Politico,
ICANN recently embarked on a controversial expansion
of the Internet’s domain-name system, preparing to
approve hundreds of new Web endings (eg .clothing, .shop,
.hospital) over the next year. Industry groups have criticised
the programme, saying it will increase the potential for
cybersquatting and add to their costs.
Clearly, ICANN is working to project a more international
vibe, having announced last year that it would open new
hubs in Singapore and Istanbul.
And it has been emphasising the global aspects of its
domain-name expansion, which will introduce new
non-English Web endings in Cyrillic, Chinese and Arabic.
Transatlantic Cable
Image: www.bigstockphoto.com Photographer Zsolt Ercsel
