FYI:
People interested in coalitions and policy-making on a global scale--topics that are increasingly relevant in a world whose borders are irrelevant to carbon dioxide, flu viruses, and other critical entities--need to learn from other organizations that are dealing with these issues. This week brings particularly important news about the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which has been making policy for eleven years under a number of difficult premises:
- It was created hastily and arbitrarily without roots in the communities most interested in its mandate.
- Its concept of stakeholders is boundless, potentially involving anyone who uses the Internet or gets information that has passed at some point over the Internet.
- Its reach is global, and its decisions are affected by issues of language and culture.
Those in charge of ICANN have compounded these intrinsic problems with poor decisions and bad leadership. But ICANN is currently undergoing one of its regular reorganizations. Hopes were on the rise that it may overcome the barriers I've listed as well as its own history--at least till this week.
On September 30, the U.S. Department of Commerce, which is ICANN's publicly accountable overseer, announced the most important decision affecting ICANN since its founding: the U.S. government will give up its role as overseer and make ICANN independent. ICANN's missteps in the past pushed the Commerce Department to seriously consider revoking ICANN's authority. But that can never happen now.
Instead, a body called the Governmental Advisory Committee provides input to be heeded or ignored by ICANN, at its option. And because this committee is so diffuse, its members possessing different interests and agendas, one can hardly imagine them coming together to strongly voice opposition to a controversial ICANN decision.
Reactions among Internet observers also indicate that this unprecedented assignment of authority was handled in secrecy, which is an odd way, to say the least, for a government agency to carry out a critical policy.
Therefore, the questions that ICANN's history raises about governance and participation become even more relevant.
The stakes for ICANN and its stakeholders
From October 25-30, at ICANN's regular meeting in Seoul, board members will meet with representatives of its noncommercial users constituency (NCUC) to consider a proposal to improve relations with these communities. The non-commercial users constituency is an umbrella for a wide range of interested parties, ranging from political action organizations and academic researchers to artists and journalists who use the Internet for distribution and collaboration.
To some extent, the non-commercial users constituency is the soul of ICANN, where the domain-name registrars and registries are its machinery and the commercial users constituency its fuel. ICANN needs all these constituencies--now they're being renamed "stakeholder groups"--but they are currently way out of balance.
Robin Gross, a long-time volunteer activist with the NCUC, described to me a regulatory environment on ICANN that is all too familiar to people working for the public interest in other settings. The other three stakeholder groups pay experts to work full-time on ICANN issues; these experts travel to all the meetings and are on a first-name basis with the board and staff. In contrast, the NCUC is cobbled together from volunteers having different interests and backgrounds, often struggling to fund a single representative at official gatherings.
It should be pointed out that the four stakeholder groups work through just one branch of ICANN--but an important branch that deals with the issues of most interest to ICANN observers, the top-level domains such as .com, .org, and .edu. This branch of ICANN, called the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO), is the focus of the current reorganization.
The source of hope lies in the increased role assigned to the NCUC within the GNSO. (Spend just a couple more hours learning about ICANN, and you too will start eliminating natural language from your speech in favor of abbreviations.)
GNSO was originally made up of six constituencies. The NCUC used to be one of them, and commercial interests encompassed three. Now that the GNSO is made up of four stakeholder groups, one of which corresponds to the NCC, non-commercial interests seem to have a correspondingly larger footprint. But even though only one stakeholder group is now officially commercial, it has far more in common than the NCC does with the registrars and registries (all businesses, of course) to which the other two stakeholder groups are dedicated. So the non-commercial interests are still a minority, not to mention a poor cousin.
Having made some progress and been acknowledged as an important set of stakeholders, the NCUC is focused now on the question of how their representatives will be elected. I won't go into detail about this question, because I'd lose my readers after the sixth or seventh paragraph, but you can take a peek at a press release from NCUC activists. A more general examination of the GNSO reorganization has been written by Professor Milton Mueller.
The important point I want to make is that ICANN is on the cusp of improving the effectiveness of the NCUC, and through them the wider public interest that goes beyond the interests of individual registrars, trademark holders, etc.
In search of a responsive governing body
Thoughtful observers decided long ago that formal democracy won't work in a geographically distributed organization with no boundaries to membership. Attempts to make policy through voting, or to reach consensus on anything, will falter from differences in the ability of stakeholders to gain access and participate, the futility of winning sustained participation from scattered stakeholders, and the barriers to communication and community-building. The NCUC is concerned right now with installing a voting system that facilitates communication and community-building in the NCUC rather than undermining it.
Thus, an organization without clear roots in geography or a particular interest group must be governed in a centralized manner, but remain responsive to outside pressure. This is where ICANN has lapsed. It has always been dominated by its staff, and has drawn most of its board members from outsiders with little background in its subject matter. The staff are accustomed to doing whatever they think best and, when faced with a storm of public protest, hunkering down for the duration.
Given this analysis, the decision by the Commerce Department to let go the reins is disturbing. A body with a history like ICANN needs to be concerned that external judgment will ultimately be rendered on its decisions. Reviews by a responsible government agency would be far more meaningful than a diluted participation in a forum of many competing interests.
But ICANN has a new chair who, according to Robin Gross, wants to overturn the board's traditional rubber-stamp role. Furthermore, several board members have reacted warmly to approaches from NCUC members and have agreed to meet directly with them in Seoul. The decision on the voting structure for the NCUC will be small but significant, and will tell us a lot about the ability of this organization to reflect a wide range of interests.
IP JUSTICE
Robin Gross, Executive Director
1192 Haight Street, San Francisco, CA 94117 USA
p: +1-415-553-6261 f: +1-415-462-6451