April 2, 2014 [by Sam Lanfranco]: The United
States Congress’ House of Representatives Energy
and Commerce Committee has just finished a three hour session on
the NTIA
announcement to (a) transition oversight of IANA and (b) charging
ICANN with
developing the proposal for that transition process.
The videos of the session should soon be posted
to: http://energycommerce.house.gov/studio/videos
and to http://www.youtube.com/user/energyandcommerce
Fadi Chehadé testified at the session and did
an excellent
presentation of ICANN and ICANN’s role in this process. There were
partisan
comments and questions and the issues that, in my view, boiled to
the top were
the following:
First,
there are two
multistakeholder issues here. One is how the multistakeholder
approach will work in
the open and transparent development of a transition of IANA
oversight. The
world will be watching both the process and how national
governments (the US
and others) interact with and respond to that process. Second,
what sort of
multistakeholder based proposal will be the product of this
process? Both are equally
important with a multistakeholder model as a key foundation
element.
Second, there is no pressure of deadlines. The
fall of 2015
is a milestone, not a cliff. It will be a good time to assess
progress, but the
process has more time (two 2-year extensions) to have a good
multistakeholder process
produce a good multistakeholder governance result.
Third, it is clear that NTIA (aka the US
Government) will
not sign off on a proposal that compromises the four principles
stated in the
NTIA announcement.
Fourth: There was, and will continue to be,
concern that
whatever the proposed governance and oversight structures would be
for the IANA
functions, there is the worry that at some time governments
hostile to an open
Internet would be in a position to capture control of significant
aspects of
the domain name system. One cannot predict the future, so that
issue has to be
addressed with adequate care. The Committee talked about “stress
testing” any
proposal. In my view any proposal should embody elements of the
“precautionary
principle” with regard to unexpected challenges to Internet
openness and
multistakeholder governance.
Fifth: Some members of the committee noted the
breadth and
depth of global stakeholder use of the Internet and urged efforts
to broader the
engagement of stakeholders, both in this process and in the wider
governance
and operational issues of the Internet.
The videos of the session should soon be posted
to: http://energycommerce.house.gov/studio/videos
and to http://www.youtube.com/user/energyandcommerce