Amidst growing concern about the future independence of ICANN, the subcommittee of the U.S. Congress on Telecommunications and the Internet has expressed opposition to any move by the Commerce Department to alter its unilateral oversight of ICANN. Representative Edward J. Markey, the supposedly liberal Democrat from Massachusetts who chairs the Subcommittee, was joined by rightwing conservative Charles Pickering and 14 other members of the committee in the May 6 statement. The Congresspersons expressed their opposition to “any change that threatens the important U.S. role in promoting U.S. commercial and free speech principles on the Internet,” and implied that free speech principles would be threatened if NTIA “abandoned” its role “now or in the near future.”
The subcommittee members who drafted and signed this statement are badly misinformed – about ICANN, freedom of expression, NTIA oversight, and global Internet governance. We attempt here to set the record straight.
