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