The OECD's division on information and communication policy has done a better job than all other intergovernmental organizations at taking multistakeholderism seriously. In its attempt to develop Internet policy principles for its High Level Meeting on the Internet Economy in Paris this week, it fostered robust discussions among its governmental delegations, the Business and Industry Advisory Committee (BIAC), the Civil Society Information Society Advisory Council (CSISAC), the Internet Technical Community Advisory Committee (ITAC) and its own Secretariat. Each groups' views were taken seriously and had a major impact on the outcome.
Today civil society representatives announced that they could not endorse the final product, the OECD Communiqué on Internet Policy-making principles. They were the only group to defect. CSISAC believes that certain aspects of the Communiqué could be used to undermine online freedom of expression, freedom of information, the right to privacy and innovation on the Internet. I participated in these discussions as an advisor to the CS delegates and concurred with this decision.
Why the Board must move ahead with the new TLD program despite the GAC’s objections
“A dialogue between the deaf and the stupid.” That’s how Gerard de Graaf, the European Commission’s new representative on the GAC, characterized the big showdown between the GAC and ICANN’s Board Sunday in Singapore. He was half right.
Competition policy letters to ICANN part of a US-EC “plot”
It has now been confirmed that the two letters sent to the ICANN Board by antitrust authorities in the U.S. and Europe were a coordinated attempt by those government agencies to derail approval of new TLDs by the ICANN Board at the Singapore meeting. One GAC member referred to it, only half-jokingly, as a “plot.”
Cross-ownership: NTIA delivers another late hit on ICANN
June 16 – two days before the ICANN meeting begins, the day most people going to it are getting onto airplanes for long rides to Singapore – the Commerce Department has shot another unmanned drone at ICANN’s new TLD process. This one takes the form of a brief, 3 page letter about the new cross-ownership policy from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division.
Is the U.S. turning its back on innovation in Internet governance?
With its Further Notice of Inquiry (FNOI) on the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) contract, the U.S. Commerce Department
has signaled its increasing dissatisfaction with ICANN's nongovernmental global governance model. NTIA has gone out of its way to rebuff the idea of a transition to a fully denationalized regime. The idea of globalizing this aspect of Internet governance through a private sector nonprofit that governs by contract was embodied in the 1998 White Paper that led to the creation of ICANN. That idea is still promoted by ICANN itself, the Internet Society and luminaries such as Vint Cerf. But the Commerce Department is having none of it. The explanation for this seems to be conservatism. Not the Christian-evangelist nationalist conservatism of the U.S. Republican Party, but conservatism in the old-fashioned, generic sense: inertia – a lack of willingness to spend the extra energy it takes to do things in new and unfamiliar ways. The Commerce Department, and many others in Washington, are palpably weary of ICANN. This retreat to nationalism runs throughout the FNOI.
NTIA's IANA Notice contains hidden joke. Or something.
Friday the Commerce Department released a “Further Notice of Inquiry” on the important contract between itself and ICANN, known as the IANA contract. The NTIA approach to the IANA contract is a bizarre mixture of sober, reasonable statements and the utterly insane. Of course it's more fun to write about the crazy stuff before launching into a step by step analysis of the whole proceeding, so let's start with the interesting stuff.
The sad performance of the European Commission in ICANN
The EU needs new and better representation in ICANN. Its operatives in the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) are failing to uphold European values related to free expression, open internet and bottom up governance. EC representatives in ICANN are utterly devoid of any vision of what kind of policies they want or what values they wish to uphold. The EC seems interested only in more power for itself – even though it has no clear idea what it wants to do with that power. So it has locked itself into a reactionary position. It is turning its back on bottom up, multistakeholder governance and, amazingly, it is appealing to the United States to exert unilateral authority over ICANN in order to pursue its apparent goal of a governmental takeover of ICANN. It is a sorry spectacle. Evidence for those strong conclusions can be found in Commissioner Nellie Kroes' recent letters and speeches.
World IPv6 day: Time to scratch that little itch
We are now only a day away from “World IPv6 Day,” a global initiative to push network operators and content hosts to run the new IPv6 protocol. Though I am less than overwhelmed by the amount of play it is getting, this is a useful initiative, for the reasons I outline below. But it's important to warn readers against some of the hype surrounding this initiative. So before we talk about what World IPv6 Day will do, let's spend a moment focusing on what it will not do.
