ICANN & Internet Governance: How Did We Get Here & Where Are We Heading?

Progress on Point
Volume 16, Issue 15 August 2009
ICANN & Internet Governance:

How Did We Get Here & Where Are We Heading?*
Michael Palage, Moderator
David Johnson
Milton Mueller
Mike Roberts
Paul Twomey
Table of Contents
I. Introductions ................................................................................................................................ 1
II. ICANN’s Mission .......................................................................................................................... 4
III. ICANN’s Governance Structure ................................................................................................ 12
IV. New GTLDs ............................................................................................................................... 17
V. Questions & Answers................................................................................................................ 25
VI. Speaker Biographies ................................................................................................................ 31
VII. Glossary of ICANN-Related Terms .......................................................................................... 33
VIII. Background Charts ................................................................................................................. 35
A. Timeline of Internet Governance .................................................................................... 35
B. Diagram of Internet Governance .................................................................................... 36
C. Internationalized Domain Names ................................................................................... 36
I. Introductions
Ken Ferree, President, The Progress & Freedom Foundation: I’m Ken Ferree from The Progress
& Freedom Foundation and thank you all for coming to this event today on ICANN and Internet
governance. I can assure you it will be a lot better than that thing they are doing downstairs
with those two G fellows, Gore and Gingrich, about climate change or whatever. This is must
more important and much more interesting.
In all seriousness, these are very, very important issues. I think most of you know that some
very important decisions, indeed critical decisions, will be made over the next six to 12 months,
*
This is an edited transcript of a PFF Congressional Seminar that took place on April 24, 2009 in
Washington, DC. The edited transcript has not been reviewed by the program participants.
1444 EYE STREET, NW  SUITE 500  WASHINGTON, D.C. 20005

202-289-8928  mail@pff.org  www.pff.org
Page 2 Progress on Point 16.15
perhaps longer, about ICANN, the structure and future of ICANN and some basic Internet
governance issues that really will affect the way we all use and interact with the Internet at
some very fundamental level.
We at PFF think that these are issues that are not being covered as much as they deserve given
their importance. I think probably that is due to their sort of arcane nature. This is hard stuff.
As I said to somebody outside, opaque to understanding and not easily accessible for
newcomers among whom I count myself. I hope to learn a lot today. I’m sure this will be a
great presentation. We have some of the leading experts on ICANN and Internet governance
here today.
We have two moderators actually for today’s panel. The principal moderator will be Michael
Palage who is a PFF adjunct fellow and former ICANN board member. He will be assisted by
Berin Szoka, one of our senior fellows, who will be helping with crowd questions and
comments.
I will turn it over to Berin now.
Berin Szoka, Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Internet Freedom, The Progress &
Freedom Foundation: Thanks, Ken. I am Mike’s humble sidekick here. I’ve been working with
Mike on a number of ICANN papers. In particular we are going to releasing a Primer soon that
is intended to make ICANN more accessible. So our mission here is to education, distill, and
help people understand why the issues are important, what the broad themes are, and that is
really what the purpose of today’s event is.
I would encourage you to refer to our glossary today during the discussions. You will probably
also see that Steve DelBianco from NetChoice brought some extremely helpful graphics that
kind of break down the ICANN landscape. [See Section 0]. All of that will be in our Primer.
With that, I’ll turn things over to Mike who, as you heard, is a former ICANN board member and
who has worked on ICANN issues almost as long as anybody. He has an amazing knowledge of
the area and a great passion for ICANN that is shared by his panelists today.
Michael Palage, Adjunct Fellow, The Progress & Freedom Foundation: Thank you, Berin.
Again, I would like to welcome everybody here today. We are trying somewhat of, if you will, a
unique and innovative format. Today’s panel will be addressing three over-arching issues.
First is ICANN’s mission. Second is the ICANN governance structure including accountability
mechanisms and ICANN’s relationships with other governments. The third question, or the
third topic, will be ICANN’s proposal to add new generic Top-Level Domains to the root such as
.BLOG and .WEB.
Now, what I have asked the panelists to do in addressing these three questions today is to
answer these questions from three perspectives, 10 years ago when ICANN was first born,
today, and looking forward 10 years from now.
Progress on Point 16.15 Page 3
Now, in order to provide that unique perspective, I had to go to some of the founding fathers of
ICANN and all of these gentlemen here today have been here since the beginning.
Let me state for the record I did try to get some of the founding mothers of ICANN.
Unfortunately, Marilyn Cade and Becky Burr are away on travel and were not able to
participate.
Again, today’s panel here, we basically have 50 years of ICANN institutional knowledge and
experience. Both Paul Twomey and myself have actually been to over 30 of the 34 ICANN
regional meetings. Now, when you consider that the average ICANN meeting runs between
seven and 10 days and you couple that with the number of board retreats when I served on the
board with Paul, that basically means that over the last 10 years Paul and I have spent one year
of our life together at ICANN related events. I don’t know whether that is a badge of honor or a
self-certification to an insane asylum but, again, I think this is one of the things informing the
panel why I wanted to bring everyone together.
As a backdrop of today’s discussion, I wanted everyone here to sort of hop in a time machine
and go back 10 years to look at what was the framework or the landscape when President
Clinton issued the executive memorandum directing the Secretary of Commerce to privatize
the domain name space to increase competition and participation in the domain name space.
Now, at that time there were about 26 million host computers connected to the Internet and
about 100 million people that were using the Internet at that time. E-commerce was in its
infancy and, you know, Web 2.0 was just a twinkle in Tim O’Reilly’s eyes at the time.
Now let’s fast forward to today. There’s over 600 million host computers connected to the
Internet, a billion and a half people, hundreds of billions of dollars in global e-commerce, and
we have a much more diverse Internet demographics. What was originally U.S. and European is
now a very strong Asian participation of developing countries.
The dynamics have changed. Again, if you look forward another 10 years, you will probably be
looking at the majority or a significant portion, if not the majority, of the people being non-
English speakers or non-Western countries, people from Asia. Again, what is very critical in
today’s discussion of these three over-arching issues is to look at that sort of spectrum, 10 years
ago, today, 10 years forward.
I think that is important. With that backdrop out of the way, what I would like to do is to begin
by just briefly introducing the panelist and there will be no opening statements. We will deep
dive into the questions so that we provide you, the people in attendance, some time at the end
for some questions and answers because we do want to make this interactive.
The first panelist is Mike Roberts. Mike came to Washington in 1987 to promote federal
investment in research networks as the Vice President of Educom and was a founder of the
High Performance Computing Coalition. He successfully pushed for Internet and super-
computing legislation that became the High Performance Computing Act of 1991 that was
signed into law by then President George H. W. Bush. Mike had the distinction of serving as
ICANN’s original president and CEO.
Next the second panelist is Paul Twomey. Paul became President and CEO of ICANN in 2003.
Prior to his appointment as president, Paul founded Argo Pacific, an advisory and investment
firm, and served as a founding CEO of the National Office for the Information Economy,
Australia’s leading agency on issues involving the Internet. Paul has also served as Australia’s
representative to the World Trade Organization and for the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development.
The third panelist today is David Johnson. David is a visiting professor at the New York Law
Institute for Information Law and Policy. David recently retired from his position as a partner at
Wilmer, Cutler, and Pickering where he focused on a variety of Internet policies including
Internet governance, privacy, and domain names. David was also a founding director of the
Aspen Institute Internet Policy Project.
Last but not least, our final panelist is Professor Milton Mueller. Milton is a professor at the
School of Information Studies at the Syracuse University and XS4ALL Professor at the Delft
University of Technology in the Netherlands. Milton has been a stalwart within the ICANN gTLD
policy development process from the beginning and is a founder of the Internet Governance
Project, an academic consortium focused on Internet policy and governance. Milton is also the
author of the book Ruling the Root: Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace.
II. ICANN’s Mission

Mr. Palage: So now turning to the first question, which is ICANN’s mission, I would like to start
off the discussion by asking Mike Roberts to take the lead in addressing this. I think it’s
important to acknowledge what Mike did.
When Mike took over as President and CEO of ICANN he had no contracts with any contracting
parties other than the USG. He had no budget, no revenue, a staff of four people, and he was
entrusted with the security and stability of the Internet and its unique identifiers.
Again, I always respect what Mike did with that team of himself and three other staff. Perhaps,
Mike, you could start off the discussion on ICANN’s mission, what it was, what it is today, and
how it has evolved.
Mike Roberts, Internet Technology Policy Consultant, former President and CEO of ICANN:
Thanks, Mike. It’s a pleasure to be here. I see some familiar faces in the audience but for those
of you who perhaps haven’t spent a light year working on ICANN minutia, I thought I would just
make a few context setting comments about how did we get to the point where there had to be
an ICANN.
Actually, the federal government had put money into the Internet as early as 1970 working on
the original protocols as R&D money from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA). Certainly after that there was NSF money. We had ARPANET, we had NSFNET and so
on.
In the late ‘80s it became clear from the success of NSFNET that there ought to be a commercial
Internet. The President put the federal government behind that with the High Performance
Computing Act of 1991 where it was declared that it was a priority for the federal government,
for the agencies to use Internet protocols, for them to be commercialized, for the government
to partner with various enterprises and organization to promote a public/private partnership to
spread the technology widely.
Subsequently, the federal government decided to privatize NSFNET, which really turned the
field open for what today we call a commercial Internet service provider. Also Tim Berners-
Lee’s magic invention of the web was commercialized when the University of Illinois licensed it
to Netscape in 1993. That really started the Internet bubble rolling forward in a very big way
very rapidly.
By ‘95/’96/’97 it was pretty clear that there were problems developing. DARPA had a problem
with the University of Southern California being sued over John Postel’s management of IANA.
The NSF Net inspector general was sniffing around about allegations of impropriety with a
relationship and cooperative agreement with what was then network solutions.
The trademark community was in an uproar and, in fact, got some initial congressional
legislation passed on the issue of cybersquatting. It’s pretty clear that something had to be
done and with the usual magic of an interagency committee some fairly hardworking bright
folks sat down and started going through all of this.
What they did basically, and with this audience and this town I can say this, with a mixture of
typical American political idealism and cynicism and a dash of Internet spirit and culture they
came up with a couple of papers, a green paper and then a white paper, and they were
basically a blue print for moving what the research agencies had been doing into the public
sector and put it under the auspices of a private corporation.
As you might imagine, because the Executive order from the President had put everything on
hold the agencies weren’t going to do anything while the committee was working on this and
until [the U.S. Department of] Commerce had decided what to do. By the summer of 1998
there was really a lot of built-up pressure to get going and get some things done.
The Commerce Department solicited proposals from people who were interested in taking this
on and the lead proposal ended up being put together by John Postel who was the IANA and
who was a research scientist at the University of Southern California. He had many admirers.
He was a very respected figure. There were lots of helping hands. For instance, the Jones Day
Law Firm volunteered to provide pro bono legal assistance because there wasn’t any way for
John to use USC money to do any of the necessary legwork to get things done.
In the late summer of ‘98 the Postel proposal was on the table along with a couple of others
and suddenly John died of a congenital heart defect. Those of us who had been aiding his
proposal were in a very tough way and the Commerce Department was in a tough spot. The
pressure for getting going and getting some things done was even higher than before.
As a result of that, an initial board had been recruited from a number of public spirit citizens
who were willing to help. To shorten up what could be a very long story, Commerce decided to
go ahead with what had been the Postel proposal, and I volunteered to be the start-up CEO. An
initial board volunteered even though the circumstances were not the best to go ahead. We
ended up just around Thanksgiving time with what became the Memorandum of
Understanding with the government.
Now, you might ask how did you decide what to do? You had this great long shopping list. You
had an envelope that had three or four really hot items in it but around the issues was really
mushy.
Basically what happened, I think we are all aware of this today, is that a lot of the more abstract
questions were put on the shelf. They were put on the back burner. Instructions, really
marching orders to me and to the board, were to first of all do something about cybersquatting.
Secondly, do something about structural separation of the monopoly registrar situation into a
differentiation between registrars and registries. Thirdly, do something about inter-
nationalizing the environment and creating a representation of form so that this wasn’t seen
internationally as strictly a U.S. enterprise.
We started having international meetings. We agreed very early on to have two or three
meetings a year and to have most of them outside the United States to demonstrate this really
was an international thing. You have to remember as Mike mentioned to you that in those days
the Internet was an awful lot smaller than it is today so it was really kind of a new thing to go
ahead.
Let me just say since you have three very well-qualified speakers behind me. What we did for
the first couple of years was work on the crisis. We got them pretty successfully knocked down,
create a representation structure which we did, and lay the stage for the ongoing evolution of
ICANN.
Mr. Palage: Thanks, Mike. Next I would like to turn to David Johnson, [who] was very
instrumental in sort of that initial recognition of ICANN. David, if you could perhaps continue
on.
David Johnson, Visiting Professor of Law, Institute for Information Law and Policy; New York
Law School: Okay. I did represent Network Solutions in its negotiations with the Commerce
Department and with “NewCo” as we called ICANN as it was coming to be. I want to stress that
I’m not speaking for Network Solutions or anyone else now. I said to Mike earlier if he’s going
to call me a father of ICANN, I have to say I think it’s a prodigal son.
I want to take us back to what the problem was from the perspective of the private sector actor
at that time. Network Solutions had received what was essentially government grant money
under a cooperative agreement to build out the database for dot com or the net. We had
encountered the fact that the exponential increase in registrations was such that they could not
continue to perform that function based solely on government funds and so had negotiated a
contract that enabled them to charge a fee for restrictions. As that cooperative agreement was
ending, there was some unhappiness in some quarters about how NSI had gotten so lucky and
had such a promising growing business.
Some desired in particular to solve the cybersquatting problem which everyone agreed
consisted of a bunch of wise guys without any real purpose other than registering a name in
order to hold up the commercial players who happen to have a trademark that corresponded
to that name. During the course of the White Paper and the Green Paper discussions there
were wide consultations among Internet players of all kinds to figure out how to deal with this
situation.
The most troubling question at the time was not how to negotiate a structural separation so
that you could introduce at least a layer of competition at the registrar level. It actually wasn’t
even whether or not there should be new top-level domains. It was taken for granted and
made part of the articles of ICANN that the primary principles should be for them to increase
competition. It’s with considerable surprise that I observed that there have been relatively few
new Top-Level Domains created.
The real question was how do you bind all future players to some set of rules that might be
made in the future? The solution that we came to was to create a contract which unfortunately
not many people have read very closely that was based on the principle that since we were
making rules that would apply globally, we should make relatively few rules and only under
circumstances in which there was very broad agreement that there was a need for a rule and
about what the content of the rule should be. This is embodied in what is called consensus
policy clause in the contract.
At the time we were negotiating a commitment on the part of Network Solutions to obey rules
made in the future by this new entity which had very little track record.
Unidentified Speaker: None.
Mr. Johnson: And you couldn’t, of course, persuade any private actor in the Internet space to
agree to go along with whatever some other independent body might tell it to do. There was
no delegation of governmental power to ICANN.
Some of the way that Mike Roberts describes the question might make you think that ICANN
was charged with solving the problems of security and stability of the net and were engaged in
Internet governance or essentially a general purpose regulator of the net. None of those things
is true.
What we were trying to do is to create a new globally effective regime in which … people …
make a few rules associated with the [domain] name space [and] might be able to come
together and reach agreement. [It was based] on the theory that if they did, the government
could defer to them the way it defers to all kinds of private groups and standard-setting bodies
in associations and companies, for that matter, when they govern their own affairs in a
successful way that does not create undue harm for others.
In the contracts that we developed we specifically wrote a list of the topics on which ICANN
could make policy that might be imposed as a consensus policy. That is called the Picket Fence
Provision and it is very specific about the kinds of policies on which if there was a consensus
which, again, had to be demonstrated as a result of the ICANN process, the parties to the
agreement, the registries would become bound and they would also become bound to pass
that obligation down through their registrars. This is essentially a contractually based regime in
which the effort is not to make governmental policy, not to engage in general regulation, not to
take on all kinds of protocol development or security issues which a lot of other groups do
much more successfully, but instead, in the first case, address what everyone agreed was a
problem with people hijacking domain names. That effort culminated in the development of
the Uniform Dispute Resolution Policy which was negotiated among a wide range of different
people, some trademark lawyers, but some people who are very concerned at preserving free
expression on the net and protecting the rights of individuals who were not engaged in
cybersquatting but merely registering a name.
One of the first meetings in Santiago that working group of independent players, not the
[ICANN] Board, worked together in the hallways until they got to the point where they thought
they had demonstrated in wide consensus. Not that everyone agreed but that there was
sufficient support so that there was no real reason to opposition or anyone who was strongly
opposed, had an ax to grind, and wasn’t entitled to be deferred to in that.
That was in many ways the first highly successful instance of this new form of global rulemaking
to become effective and not be imposed as a result of the delegation of governmental power
but deferred to by governments around the world as a result of a successful private effort to
engage in creating order.
The assumption at the time was that all of the country code Top-Level Domains (ccTLDs) would
come into this regime. In fact, there is language in the original contract in which I can promise
to use its best efforts to bring the country code registries into the same regime. Unfortunately,
that didn’t happen in part because they had already been delegated their TLDs by John Postel.
The more they saw about the unpredictability of the ICANN process and arguing, that they were
subject to their own consensus decision-making in their own countries they essentially stayed
away from the party. That results, if you think of ICANN as a regulatory regime, in a most
bizarre circumstance in which it purports to have vast responsibilities to regulate the Internet
but half of the Internet is not subject to their regulation and won’t agree to be bound by this
same core contractual principles.
The other assumption at the time was that if it was smart, ICANN would not only locate the
policy development process in a broad group of participants rather than in a board, but that it
wouldn’t rely on voting to make decisions. It would rely on a working process that would
demonstrate consensus by the same kind of means that gave rise to the UVRP.
And that if anyone had a challenge at any point about whether consensus had really been
demonstrated that would be a new independent body called the Independent Review Panel or
some such entity that would be able to review that question and that overtime you would
develop essentially a sort of working set of principles kind of law of ICANN that would tell you
when consensus had been sufficiently demonstrated. So that is what we were thinking.
Mr. Palage: Thank you, David. You were just about to get cut off so you were on the same
wavelength. Thank you very much. Next, Milton, if you could give your insight on this
important topic.
Milton Mueller, Professor and Director, Convergence Center, Syracuse University; Author of
Ruling the Root: Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace: Thank you, Michael.
Yes, you’ve heard from people who were sort of there at the top. One of the motifs of ICANN is
sort of bottom-up policymaking. Now you are going to hear from the bottom, from the deep,
deep bottom, the kind of bottom that has treads on its back.
Now, 12 years ago, that is, we’re talking 1997, I was a big supporter of the ICANN model. In
fact, in many respects I still am in the sense that David has described it. We had hopes that
ICANN would, indeed, be a minimalist technical coordinator. You need to maintain the
uniqueness of entries in the root and you need to maintain uniqueness in the IP address space.
We thought if ICANN as being a neutral facilitator of Internet connectivity. In the same way,
and for the same reasons that people speak of net neutrality now, you don’t want an
intermediary controlling people on the Internet. You want control to be at the edges. If ICANN
could simply be this coordinator, that would all work out the way it was supposed to be. Those
hopes were almost immediately dashed in 1998. Essentially, from my point of view, what
happened is the U.S. Government delegated policymaking to a private sector corporation. It
promised to respect trademark rights but explicitly did not choose to mention or uphold free
expression rights saying that other laws take care of that.
ICANN has always been a regulator. It was set up to be a regulator and we have just heard
Michael confess and say they were told, “Do something about cybersquatting. Do something
about VeriSign,” which was then called Network Solution, and its dominance in the market.
Right there it was implemented fundamentally to do competition policy and trademark policy
on a global basis in addition to and because of its coordinating functions. So those functions
are not “mission creep” per se. They are in the White Paper and they are fundamental to what
ICANN does.
In my book I compared ICANN to the Federal Communications Commission. You think of it as
something that coordinates use of the spectrum. Well, yes, it does coordinate use of the
spectrum and that has to be done but because it has leverage over the spectrum, it has
leverage over a lot of other things. Anybody who wants to use spectrum has to go through the
FCC and the FCC tells them that they can only be so big and they can’t merge with this person
or that person or they can’t have certain kinds of content. So, there is a regulatory nexus
through the root that ICANN has fundamentally always been about.
You can go further along that route or less far along that route and it’s always been worthwhile
to try to keep ICANN as minimal as possible but it’s inevitable that either governments or the
private sector actors will use that leverage.
Ten years ago—actually, it was indeed 10 years ago—I predicted that ICANN’s budget would
exceed that of the International Telecommunications after 10 years. This is on the record. It’s
an e-mail that I sent to a group. People scoffed at me. They told me I was crazy. Who’s crazy
now?
The fact of the matter is that most vested interests in this game don’t want ICANN to be a
technical coordinator. They want it to be a regulator so we have gotten what we asked for.
Now looking forward 10 years, in line with Michael’s question, we have to ask what do we
really want it to be?
I expect ICANN to continue to be an economic regulator of DNS in certain respects. I think
there are a lot of things that it could be withdrawn from and should be withdrawn from and
we’ll get into that in more detail when we talk about the new TLD process.
Fundamentally ICANN is in place as a controller of the route, just as the FCC is in place as a
controller of the spectrum in the U.S. The question we have to ask is how much of that
regulatory authority do we want to use at that global level and how much do we want to use or
retain at national levels or through consensus based industry self-governance processes.
Mr. Palage: Thank you, Milton. You have the last word on this topic.
Paul Twomey, President & CEO of ICANN: Thanks, Mike. I am very pleased to be here and
would like to thank you and the organization for putting this together. It’s great. There are so
many faces I recognize in the room.
Why don’t I try just putting in a few aspects and this is obviously a much bigger story to tell
than we can this afternoon. I can recall the first time I became conscious of the move towards
ICANN. I was the head of agency working to the cabinet on economy issues and the U.S.
released the green paper.
We had done an analysis of it and my people ran into my office and said, “This is a disaster. It’s
terrible. It’s so eccentric as if the rest of the world hasn’t got the Internet.” We are close allies
so we don’t say things like, "this is a disaster" or "this is terrible."
We tend to write nice letters so we wrote a nice letter back saying basically very good, we sort
of agree with the approach. The approach essentially, I think very importantly, was at the time
was first do no harm. That was a mantra that many governments had in the OECD in particular
as this was first growing. First, do no harm.
So we looked at the model and said we think it should be more international. We formally
write back the Japanese, the Canadians, the Brits, and the European Commission all responded,
I think, mostly through missions rather than in written format.
The next version of the White Paper was more international. It actually did have a more
international respect to it. Then it evolved and first with John and then [Joe] Sims [of Jones
Day] and Mike and others we were engaged in different ways in sort of thinking through how
NUCO would develop, etc.
I would just make this observation partly from what we just heard. I think one of the things we
should think about when we talk about this is, “What is the Internet?,” and let’s just use a very
simple model. Transit [costs] $250,000 plus [mostly] private networks, [and] a protocol layer ….
basically makes those network operators a single global interruptible Internet.
Very importantly, and I really want to stress this, the protocols do not recognize geographic
boundaries. I think that is at the heart of all this discussion because it is either a single global
interruptible Internet at that protocol level or it is a fractionalized, balkanized series of
Internets that are going to find some way to talk to each other. It‘s either one or the other.
There is no halfway house.
The thing about that is applications. I think a lot of the policy discussion and political discussion
all around the world when it talks about the Internet often thinks it‘s the same thing. It’s all
that stuff when in reality it‘s not.
There are a lot of issues around content on the Internet, for instance, come from the
application and we will argue the content for 5,000 years as communities will keep arguing for
the next 5,000 around content. I think that is an application issue.
In net neutrality, who pays for the investment and all that stuff is mostly a transit issue but the
core thing we‘re talking about here is how do you coordinate the rules for the support of
identifiers to name names like the addressing NS numbers or such things—the IS number, sorry,
that keep the networks operating as a single, global, interruptible Internet and that is the goose
that lays the golden egg.
I used to be the head or deputy of a trade organization/trade agency. I dealt with non-tariff
barrier problems the entire time, tariff problems and all that stuff in the physical world. Most
of us don‘t even think about that in the Internet because it has this underlying layer. I think I
want to stress that because it has an influence on all these discussions that we‘re having.
Just a couple of observations. First of all, I know we talked about it as a private sector
organization, but we should reinforce it‘s a non-profit. It has the word corporation in its name
but it‘s not a for-profit organization. It‘s just a small thing that was important.
I think many of the points made by the other speakers are quite true. I think what evolved over
time from that starting period is a model that I now describe a little bit like the following: It has
an element of a parliament about it. It has a whole range of constituencies who over time
evolved a way in which they wanted a voice particularly around the issues of, first of all, what is
consensus policy and then sort of broader discussions.
And part of its growth, for instance, was to try to get the country codes in. So the countries to
start with were not interested in participating. We now have 85 or 90 country codes now part
of [their] own organization. They’ve now developed similar constituencies.
So the mandate to narrowly define around DNS coordination, IP address allocation, has not
changed. The number of people who want to be involved has changed and the thing has
actually moved, I think, to accommodate that almost like the chambers of a parliament, if you
like, who then themselves get to elect the cabinet, if you want to put it that way, which is the
board. And then there’s a bureaucracy that supports them which I happen to head.
But I think it‘s been an interesting progression of how to have an internationally involved and
recognized group of people and bottom-up group of people confronted with this problem of
how do you coordinate the rules for it to remain truly global. How do you keep introducing the
competition issues that were raised earlier on.
I think the work David and others did on the contracts, particularly the consensus policy clause,
is an act of genius. What it essentially does is have new players join the space buy into an
uncertainty for the future which allows this sort of semi-political process to keep setting the
rules as the thing evolved.
Mark, you made a point in your opening remarks 10 years ago when this started it as an OECD
issue. When I was asked to chair the GAC I wrote every minister of communications in the
world and said, “Please participate.” We got 34 responses essentially with the OECD and a few
Asian countries. Now it‘s 120 countries.
That is a reflection, I think, of just sort of the open model that asks people to join in. I don‘t
think the mandate changes but the number of people who are affected by the mandate and
want to be involved, I think that is the key dynamic for 17 years.
III. ICANN’s Governance Structure

Mr. Palage: Actually, that‘s an excellent segue into the second over-arching issue which is the
ICANN governance structure, the accountability and its relationships with the United States
government as well as other national governments.
Again, I think for those of you who walked in this morning, one of the things the speakers may
like to talk about on this issue here is that this morning the NTIA [National Telecommunications
and Information Administration] issued an NOI in connection with the JPA so I think this is
something that is relevant. I know we may not have had that much time to read the document
but for those that have, if you could perhaps interject the impact of that document on the
broader governance structure. For this I would like to start off with Milton to lead off this
discussion.
Mr. Mueller: Well, the question is what about the accountability governance, how does it need
to be reformed. This was one of the most interesting things about the formation of ICANN 10
years ago.
It was the constitutional problem, as it was called at the time. We fancied ourselves, those of
us involved in it, as attending some kind of cyber-constitutional convention thinking about
issues of representation and issues of accountability for a global institution that was supposed
to have some power but a limited amount of power.
Originally, there was a vision of a combination of representation through the supporting
organizations which were these bottom-up structure that were what you call in Hong-Kong a
functional constituency or, in other places, a kind of corporatism where different sectors of
society were represented as trademark holders, business, noncommercial organizations,
registries, registrars. They would get together in these supporting organizations and formulate
policy and it would be passed up to the board. Then half of the board would come from these
functional constituencies or these corporate entities and the other half would be elected by
individual Internet users on a global basis. This was very exciting. This was a new institution.
This was global democracy bypassing national states.
In line with Paul’s emphasis on the importance of bypassing this territorial fragmented
politicized Internet and maintaining global compatibility and global interconnection, what could
be more appropriate than having a globally demographic and corporate structure that bypassed
nation states and achieved direct accountability to the global Internet community.
We are very excited about this. I hope this doesn’t sound insulting, but it’s not going to be a
controversial statement, but I’m not going to be able to justify it so I’m just going to throw it
out there. Essentially they had their election and the wrong people won so they abolished the
elections. That is my line and I’m sticking to it. What did they replace it with?
They replaced it with something called an at-large advisory committee and they created sort of
a mushy structure of regional at-large organizations in which you would say to your typical
individual Internet user, “You want to influence Internet policy? You can. How are you going to
do it? Well, devote the rest of your life to building a regional organization that elects
somebody to a global organization that has this much input into another board that sets
policy.” Doesn’t that sound like a good proposition, a good way to spend your time?
Naturally the at-large advisory committee had a difficult time getting off the ground. You do
have a nominating committee which the at-large appoints people which selects some of the
board members. In fact, I’ve heard people in civil society are divided on the nominating
committee. Some people think it’s a joke and other people—not a joke. I’m sorry. It’s not a
joke. Some people think it’s too indirect and it’s a deviation from democracy and other people
think that it is a very careful and deliberate way to select good people for the board.
The problem is either way there is no political accountability. In other words, if ICANN’s board
agrees on the wrong policies, let’s say, ICANN does the equivalent of the war in Iraq and
invades the wrong country, how do you replace these people? Do you throw the bums out and
get new people in who have a better idea about policy? Well, you can’t with this system. It’s
very diffused. It’s very incremental. You can basically nominate yourself for the board and
then go through this committee structure which secretly picks people so it’s a difficult issue
there.
I don’t want to go over time here but I have a little capital in the bank here. This accountability
issue is really complex. To my mind the real problem with ICANN accountability is the utterly
diffuse nature of the process and its total flexibility. Flexibility sounds good but it really means
that the process is able to be manipulated and unpredictable and the rug can be pulled out
from you at any moment.
People spend three years agreeing on a policy through a bottom-up process and then the rules
change and some other processes follow or some powerful player didn’t get exactly what they
wanted or someone went outside and complained to the U.S. Government or the management
has a hidden agenda and plays one supporting organization off against the other one, or big
business mobilizes against it at the last minute. You never know what’s going to happen.
Maybe that’s just life and maybe I’m just a baby but it’s really not the kind of thing that you
want to spend a lot of time on if you are just an ordinary user trying to make ICANN
accountable to your interests. If you’re a full-time lobbyist, yeah, full employment.
Okay. So someone in an academic paper aptly described this. They hit the nail on the head.
They called it the multiple accountability disorder of ICANN. Think of it as this ADD kind of 12-
year-old kid running around playing video games and singing songs and beating things on the
wall.
Just to wrap up here, let me just quickly say that three points of transformation affecting
ICANN’s future. Number one is the USG relationship. Number two is the relationship to other
states through the Governmental Advisory Committee which is something we really need to
talk about. Third is the move toward more balanced representation where ICANN at the
moment seems to be making some progress.
To sum up, we need to stop playing games with ICANN. Either it’s a free-standing innovative
form of global governance or it’s just a U.S. Government contract. If it is the former, if it’s going
to be free to the U.S., we need to get serious about the international legal framework within
which it operates, we have to set a firm date for its liberation. We need to talk about
accountability to the general public and not just to the latest special interest groups that make
noise.
The long-term sense of accountability is an institutional sense. We need to strengthen its
external accountability. We need to cure it of multiple accountability disorder. We need to
prevent it from being co-opted by governments including the U.S. Government.
And we need to continue to reform its bottom-up processes and make them real and binding
and not just a playpen for suckers who are deluded into believing in them until they find out
otherwise. Thank you.
Mr. Palage: Okay. There you go. Now you’re back on par so you’re even. I’ll hold you to a
strict limit in the third question. Next I would like to turn to David Johnson to offer your insight
on this topic.
Mr. Johnson: Well, I think a lot of what Milton says is true in terms of the failure of ICANN to
credibly engage non-lobbyists for special interests in its activities. In my view, the most
fundamental mistake that has been made is to think of using voting as a way of making
decisions.
In the early state, there was something called the Domain Name Supporting Organization. It
was meant to include everyone with an interest in domain names. There were other groups
worried about other problems.
The central group that organized that was thought of as a steering committee but what came to
pass overtime is that the central group began to decide that it could forward a policy to the
board only when there were a certain number of votes, two-thirds vote on the Domain Name
Supporting Organization (DNSO) council. I knew we were in trouble when people started
printing Member of the DNSO Council on their business cards. Although I thought the
experiment in individual voting for board members was exciting, I think no model that tries to
rely on voting is going to work in this context because it just creates a battle for seats on
whatever decision making body you have. The whole space, as Paul said, is too dynamic to
support anything but essentially gaming of a process that involves votes.
That’s not to say that ICANN doesn’t need to be accountable and it is in various ways.
First, insofar as its decisions are susceptible to challenge and some independent process
whether it’s an independent review panel which would, I think, be better. It would be expert in
what ICANN is trying to accomplish but at least an independent arbitration process of the type
that has been invoked by the applicant for the .XXX domain, for example, will add to ICANN’s
accountability and legitimacy no matter how those decisions come out because there will be
somebody with independence who can rule on whether they violated a by-law or complied
with a contract.
Secondly, it has always been part of this notion that this global private sector coordinating and,
to some degree, policy making under limited circumstances body would need to have
conversations with governments. In fact, the government advisory committee was set up for
the purpose of facilitating that conversation and organizing it and making sure that people
could turn up and have conversations together.
I think it’s very important to think of that as an advisory committee, one which has
conversations. More recently changes have been made to require the ICANN board to explain
itself to the Governmental Advisory Committee if it disagrees with the GAC. But I believe it’s
still contemplated that the board may disagree with the GAC.
Governments aren’t going away so anybody who is subject to the jurisdiction of a government
whether it’s a registry or ICANN, which will surely be subject to at least some governments, is
going to have to comply with whatever governments do in making law.
Again, the game here, the idea, the goal was to create a self-regulatory regime that would be
entitled to and could expect the demand difference from the local legal authorities.
Lastly, I think there is a lot of debate and discomfort in Europe about whether ICANN is a
creature of the U.S. Government. The idea from the very beginning was not to make it a
creature of the U.S. Government. Insofar as the U.S. Government was going to exercise some
special responsibility, I always thought of that in terms of the U.S. Government acting as a
trustee or fiduciary for the global community with, we hope, the best intentions.
So if the U.S. Government were to decide, which I don’t think is likely, but if it were to decide
that it can delegate power to ICANN, it has the power to tell them what to do. The problem is
that won’t work because the rest of the world is in a position to decide not to go along with
that. Ultimately, the accountability has to be more conversational and indirect.
Mr. Palage: Thank you, David. Mike and I actually had this topic of discussion last night over
dinner of the whole legitimacy. Perhaps you could continue on with what David was talking
about.
Mr. Roberts: Thank you. I’m going to be brief but dense, I think. One of the issues we had 10
years ago was trying to create an experiment in the Internet space that would transcend some
of the day-to-day problems we have about problem solving, especially problem solving
involving technology.
Anybody who was involved at that time [thought] there were at least as many people who
thought that ICANN would fail as thought it would succeed. I used to get Monday morning
phone calls of two types. One would say, “Have you quit yet?” The next guy would say, “Have
you been sued today?”
From the vantage point of today I think it’s safe to say that the ICANN experiment has been a
success. But almost everybody that is involved will say, “Yes, but...” and then follows a series of
bullets from a wide variety of perspectives of all of the problems. I think Milton has been very
articulate about a set associated with what you might call constitutional duties and
responsibilities and accountabilities.
David has pointed out that private sector organizations have to have some degree of certainty
about their relationships both between each other and the government. So, I think the state is
one chunk of the dilemma.
ICANN clearly has quasi-governmental functions and their controversy, a major part of the
controversy surrounding ICANN, has to do with it but we don’t see the accountability that goes
with governments. We don’t see people being elected. We don’t see democratic elections.
That sort of begs the question about how could you conceive of any kind of effective
democracy in cyberspace, at least at this point in time.
To cut to the quick because we are so pressed for time, it seems to me that the [U.S.]
Department of Commerce with this latest NOI and so on is kind of bringing this to the cusp of
the dilemma where we have to either cede those quasi things back to the government, or some
coalition of governments, which is more likely, or to find a way to put more legal strength, if
you will, in ICANN whereby a sense of accountability is strengthened.
I’ll give you a couple very quick examples. One is the town is full of the Hathaway Report right
now. There is a draft Rockefeller bill out, S.B. 773, that has specific provisions in it about the
Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).
There is a very strong sense in the Obama Administration and in the Defense Department in
particular that we are now dealing with critical infrastructure and it would be ludicrous to even
suggest that the government would let these functions out of its direct management and
control.
Many people in the government see the Joint Project Agreement (JPA) and the IANA contract as
instruments of the U.S. Government’s responsibility to make sure that ICANN doesn’t go off the
track. That may be erroneous but that is the way a lot of relatively important and influential
people feel.
On the other hand, and I think Milton has spoken to this already, there is a very broad sense
that we need institutions in cyberspace and we are so far making very little progress on that
front. In the United States, at least, we have a tradition of public institutions that goes back a
long time. We’ve had leaders that have believed in that model and that motif and have done
something about it.
For instance, Steven Mather almost singlehandedly, who was a guy who made millions, by the
way, digging borax out of the dessert in California, he was the creator of the United States
national park system. He built on Lincoln and others who created the first couple of parks but
now we have a public institution in the national park system. Ken Burns is about to release a
really path-breaking, precedent-setting series on the national parks which he calls America’s
Best Idea.
Another one is Abraham Lincoln. In the middle of fighting the Civil War of all things [he] went to
Congress and said, “You know, we need some institutions to promote science.” The U.S.
Congress granted the charters for the National Academies of Science in 1863 in the middle of
the Civil War. That’s a potential mechanism for matching up this asymmetry we have between
the quasi-governmental things without any of the authority.
In the long run there has to be some kind—I’m on record publicly about this—there has to be
some kind of multi-lateral binding arrangement but the U.S. isn’t ready for that, the
international community is not ready for that. We have to take some more baby steps to get
there.
It’s possible that a congressional charter, which the Clinton people with the impeachment trial
hanging over them and Gore worried about his campaign absolutely were not going to go to
Congress and ask for anything. When I was a CEO and I would go and visit in other countries,
the first thing they would tell me about how their legislature had just passed their first Internet
bill and this was 1999, the U.S. everybody is saying, “Oh, we can’t go to Congress. They will do
the wrong thing.” That is a head-in-the-sand approach regardless of whether you are a
Democrat or a Republican.
It’s crazy for the United States not to have legislation that deals with the appropriate pieces of
this puzzle. We now have the best opportunity in a generation to do something about that.
The stars are in alignment if God is willing. I’ve talked too long. I’ll shut up.
IV. New GTLDs

Mr. Palage: That’s okay. Actually, I was supposed to—Paul, you were supposed to go third so
you are actually going to start off. You are going to go back-to-back now, Paul. You get the last
word on governance and then you will also get the first word on new gTLDs.
Mr. Twomey: And you planned that. Oh, where to start? I think we’ve got to come back in this
whole discussion about accountability to this fundamental conundrum that we are talking
about the coordination of a set of functions that are global.
They had global functions by design. It is the only global technology, the only global
technology. Every other technology in its implications is a series of multi-domestics that join to
each other. Electricity grids, telephone systems, airline systems, etc. The protocol part of the
Internet is the only global technology function. The challenge then is in accountability terms
several parts. If you don’t mind me saying, as a non-American, when everyone here said quasi-
governmental functions, what I wrote down is, “Yeah, but whose government?”
Be very careful what you ask for. Be very, very careful what you ask for because there are 190
governments out there who would be more than happy to somehow or the other think that’s
their function. Once you’re there you have now got licenses for the Internet. So everyone
who’s a registry or registrar in this room think really carefully what the world would look like if
you had to get 190 licenses to operate your business worldwide. We should be very conscious
of what the alternative is here.
In the broad sense we either maintain this global function or we don’t. I think the role of the
United States is incredibly important and has historically been a very important in the role of
this building and the Congress is incredibly important.
I think, to be frank, we’ve just seen in the last three, four, five, six months significant players in
the international system saying “Is the U.S. role of being the only people who’ve got a role to
coordinate things going to continue?”
Often building institutions is not perfect. This has been a unique experience, how to build a
truly global, multi-stakeholder, bottom-up coordination function. There aren’t too many of
them around so you sort of stumble through the process of trying to build it.
It was interesting to hear Milton’s critique. I could point to people in this room who talk on the
same issues Milton raised who would have completely opposite views or different views. I
think that has been a key part of the accountability the community has actually developed is to
try to keep building internal mechanisms to keep having that dialogue.
For instance, we have built into the by-laws a requirement that each of the structures in ICANN
have to be reviewed internally every three years. That process is not perfect. We are learning
how to do that.
We have built in how to keep reviewing how you elect board members. Half the board
members are elected directly by these organizations. Half are indirectly elected through the
non com process but that is open for discussion.
I think having built into the DNA of the organization a high level of accountability to which
participating community to keep asking themselves how they want to reform it is a key thing
that we need to keep.
I agree with Mike, we do have to think through this other interaction which is there are areas
that ICANN’s functions interact with now, which governments and others are going to see is
core business. Some security is a good example. And how do you find that balance where you
say, “Here is the role we play and here is the role you want to play.” I think the GAC is going to
be an important part of that.
I think accountability has to keep coming back to the community who are involved, engaging
and being more involved, but then it being accountable to that community. Inversely, and this
is, I think, another side where you were, Mike, it’s that the community itself being serious
about taking up its accountability and responsibilities.
There are people who would interpret the function that takes place here in this town as being
people who want to play both side of the fence. They want to critique. They want to sort of
critique internally at ICANN but they don’t want to own the responsibility of owning the reform.
What they want to be able to do is critique in ICANN and then run to Congress or run to
Washington and complain as well. I think you were also making that point. To a degree maybe
one of the things at the time is to say to people, “No, if the thing needs to keep evolving and
changing, the mechanisms are there for it other than the problem and keeping responsibility
for it.” Don’t be ineffective by not either being effective in Washington or effective in ICANN
and that sort of thing. I think that is part of the message around the JPA process and its due
date in September.
I think this is a forcing mechanism for others to say, “If you want to keep performing things and
you want to keep changing accountability mechanisms, which this review process is at now,
own that problem. Be part of that solution. Don’t just be the critic of it.” A bit rambling but
that’s just an observation.
Mr. Palage: Yes. That is one of the things, Paul, that resonates with me. When Joi Ito 1 served
on the board, it’s great to identify it, but come up with a solution. Again, be part of the
solution, not necessarily part of the problem.
Okay. We are actually running only a couple of minutes behind, doing a little better. Our last
topic of the day is something that, as David mentioned, was part of, if you will, ICANN’s original
band-aid of increasing innovation and competition in the topic of new generic top-level
domains.
Also if anyone would like to talk about, we also could talk about the internationalized top-level
domains, specifically the fast track initiative for some Country Code Top Level Domains
(CCTLDs). [See Section VIII.C]. Again, Paul, I’m going to ask you to perhaps start off on this.
Mr. Twomey: Thanks, Mike. As you say, that was at the very founding proposals around UCO
and ICANN. Mike and Dave and others have had much experience in this. ICANN has had two
rounds of looking at introducing new TLD fund in 2000 and another one again in 2003 onwards.
1. http://www.icann.org/en/biog/ito.htm
They were both followed in the Internet spirit which was, “Let’s at least try and see what we
learn from that process.” That was the 2000 round that looked a little bit like a VC. More
people applied than were available and the board was called to pick one over the other and
that didn’t seem to be a perfect process.
The second time around there was a writing which said try to limit the type of TLDs because
they were seen at the time to be sort of okay and then people sort of tried to effectively
redefine their business model into the criteria to see if they can be selected and people apply
things and people noticed some surprises there.
In 2003 the board also asked the generic name supporting organization to start the work on
policy development for an ongoing open process for applying for TLDs. That group worked for
three years developing policy and very importantly had all the constituencies involved in it,
electoral property interest, business interest, registries, registrars, non-commercial.
There was a lot of input from the governmental advisory committee. There was input from the
country code name supporting organization. Security people gave input. All of these different
constituencies in the ICANN parliament, all these different houses, all had input to a policy that
came up.
Then in June last year the board said, “Okay, we are going to approve that policy. It has come
up through the process,” then asked the staff, “Can you implement?” We had a quick glance
and said, “We probably can.” We started effectively an 18-month process of consultation with
the community about how you would actually implement it and we are still going through that
process.
Many of the issues that were raised in the policy development process have re-emerged again
in this consultation process and many of the people who fought the case two or three years ago
are now back fighting the same case as if it’s a new thing, and it’s not. It is actually affecting—
some of these points have been picked up by new players certainly and that’s been effective.
We are looking to a process of that sort of consultation and then coming up with solutions.
There is a pattern of things in ICANN which tends to be people work up a proposal, the proposal
goes out, people aren’t happy about proposal. People who are unhappy about proposal are
asked to give the solution to the proposal. They come back to work on the solution and it
works through.
To take one, which many people in the room are aware of, there have obviously been concerns
with intellectual property interests, specifically around second level—how intellectual property
interests would be defended at the second level in new TLDs as well as at the top level.
There is no intent by any parties that this should be extortion or that there is any sort of
attempt to try to make this an unsafe space. The board has just asked a group of people from
the individual property groupings and asked people to come forward with some proposals.
There are now, I think, five papers being looked through by those groups of proposals. If they
were to go ahead, they would be more stringent on intellectual property rights than the
existing gTLD contracts by a long way.
That might also have a similar impact upon issues that emerged around malware and
responding to malware things that relate to the DNS. I’ll stop there, Mike, but just to say we
are only halfway through a process of consultation or implementation. To reinforce, especially
those here from Congress who are new, this is a small peep of the political process like it always
is. It’s noisy.
It’s designed to get interest groups to talk and bring issues and build nice views about too many
interest groups or whatever but they get a chance to come and respond. We are halfway
through a process where certain groups are saying, “We are not happy with who we are at the
moment.”
We’re saying, “Fine. That’s great. That’s why we’re doing this. We want to hear these issues.
We want you to come in now with proposals for solutions and we’ll keep doing that for the rest
of this year."
Mr. Palage: Thank you, Paul. Milton, as someone who has lived through both the 2000 and
2004 process, perhaps you could provide your insight on the current initiative.
Mr. Mueller: In the current initiative, yes. I’ll concentrate on the current initiative. I have
many opinions about the earlier ones but most of them are unprintable. The main thing that
needs to be said about the 2004 process is to make a reference to the .XXX fiasco because that
has implications as to where we are now.
The .XXX was a situation in which ICANN basically agreed that a certain domain met their
criteria and then when the U.S. Government was lobbied by conservative religious groups, they
decided that literally within a span of a week the U.S. Government was supporting this top-level
domain and then decided that they didn’t support it. This succeeded in getting the ICANN
board to be turned around on the issue and yanking the TLD approval back from them.
The reason for that was because of the content, the semantic implications of .XXX. It was
considered a “public policy issue” in which governments were supposed to have a special say.
The .XXX fiasco led directly to the GAC principles on new TLDs in which the Government
Advisory Committee then set a bunch of parameters to the next TLD round about what would
and would not be acceptable new top-level domains. This time the GAC got a laundry list of
things that they didn’t want to happen in the top-level domain name space. Not just obvious
pornography but a broad swath of things called anything of—I think I remember the phrase -
“cultural, national, religious sensitivities, morality and public order.” All of these words that
raise these issues are going to be censored in the new top-level domain name space.
Now, that’s okay for Saudi Arabia. That is okay for different governments having different
policies about how you regulate speech. It’s not okay for the United States of America with the
First Amendment. Yet, it’s going to happen and it’s going to be applicable to the United States
of America. In other words, if I apply for .NAZI, not that I would but supposed as a hypothetical
that somebody in this country wants to apply for .NAZI, that is a legal form of expression. It is
not illegal to be a Nazi.
It is not illegal to be a Falun Gong member but there is no question that .NAZI or .FALUNGONG
would be knocked out of contention through the process that ICANN has adopted because if its
policy applying criteria of morality and public order.
Now, the even more dangerous thing about this is that this is content regulation. Earlier Dr.
Twomey said that ICANN is all about the packet layer, about the Internet protocol layer and not
about content which is an application layer.
ICANN has adopted policies regarding new Top-Level Domains that says that they cannot incite
to violence or other common forms of insulting expression. You tell me how a three-letter
string can incite. What does it mean to incite? You have to be in a place urging people to take
some kind of violent action. No string of characters inherently is inciting. You cannot be
inciting unless you are talking about two things: who uses this domain and what do they say on
that domain or what do they say with the domain names with a content on the domain.
By regulating morality and public order in Top-Level Domains you are regulating expression.
You are regulating content in the most direct way. That is about the substance of the policy
which I obviously don’t like but let’s talk about the process.
We participated fully in this process. We screamed and yelled about the censorship process.
We lost in the process and we were fully prepared to accept this loss. It was like, “Okay, you
got out voted. Nobody from any other constituency supported the civil libertarians here so we
loss. We are going to have this horrible new top-level domain process."
But no, there was a different process when the trademark owners exploded about it. As Paul
indicated, they had participated all along. They had voted for this policy. Suddenly we’ve got a
different process. It’s a bunch of trademark lawyers huddled in a room called the
Implementation Review Team.
They are going to come up with a new process for approving these top-level domains. I don’t
know what it’s going to be because I wasn’t invited to be part of this team. That’s not all
speaking of process. Somebody else jumped up and down and screamed. It was the country
codes. They said, “We want new top-level domains, too, in our native languages.
No, we don’t want to go through a process. We don’t want to pay you $185,000 and get our
things vetted by the ICANN process. We just want them. Will you give them to us, please?”
“Yes, we will give them to you. We’ll call it the fast track process.”
When I was complaining about multiple accountability disorder, this is what I’m talking about.
You can participate in the process in good faith for three years and you can have the rug pulled
out from under you at the last minute. You never know what is going to happen.
It isn’t about owning the problem. We tried to own the problem. The problem went all over
the place. I don’t know. Who owns it? We tried very hard to own this process and it didn’t
exactly work so I’ll leave it at that.
Mr. Palage: Okay. David—Paul?
Mr. Twomey: I’m sorry, Mike. I just need to say that, just for the record, I do not agree with
the characterization of the .XXX experience. I just need to make that quite clear.
Mr. Palage: Jeffrey Le Vee [of Jones Day] and ICANN will be responding accordingly. We’ll let
the lawyers resolve that issue. David, you’re up.
Mr. Johnson: I think the question you have to ask yourself is how did it come to be? Why does
ICANN get to tell anybody not to open a new TLD or to only do that if they have some sunrise
period to protect trademarks and so forth? Where do they get that power?
Why should they be enabled by all the participants to make that kind of decision, especially
against the background of a formation in which the purpose of establishing ICANN was to
increase competition whenever possible and to prevent the use of the potential lever of the
domain name system from being used to control the content of the net?
The most fundamental purpose of the picket fence provisions is to keep ICANN, which it readily
agrees it doesn’t want to do, to use its leverage which it could do. It could say flowing down
contractual obligations and say, “You take that domain off the net because we don’t like what is
there.” The whole object of the exercise was to keep that from happening. I have great
problems with Roberts’ idea that we should infuse more legal strength into the sanity. My
solution is that we should go back to a much narrower vision and make clearer to everybody
that the purpose of the exercise is to make coordinated policy.
Admittedly it’s policy, it’s not technology, in a very narrow area and not to use the lever created
by this new contract that you need to open a new TLD to impose a complex set of additional
requirements. I personally think the worries of trademark owners and governments about
particular strings are nonsense and if they were enacted would dramatically over-extend what
trademark laws were traditionally designed to protect against.
That is just my view. What I really more strongly feel is that we shouldn’t be allowing ICANN to
get trapped into those kinds of games because they then do lead to all of this confusing and
counter-productive process.
The U.S. can contribute a core idea to the global Internet here without putting itself in the
position of regulating the net itself and that is to insist on the consent of the government in a
global context. I think that can be accomplished not only by being very narrow—being very
clear about the narrow confines of the particular kinds of government that ICANN should try to
engage in.
Mr. Palage: Thank you, David.
Mike, you get the last word on the topic of new TLDs. Just before turning it over to Mike, I
think I started off this session by sort of acknowledging the incredible work Mike did at the
outset, no budget, staff of four.
The proof of concept round that ICANN undertook back in 2000, the ICANN board approved the
old DSNO policy in July. The criteria was published in August. Applications were accepted in
October and the board approved seven out of 48 applications in November, five months.
I think there is a lot of reasons why this process has become more complex but, again, I just
want to try to acknowledge what Mike, Louie, Andrew, and that original ICANN staff did in
really plowing through some difficult situations with some limited resources.
Mike, perhaps you could elaborate on your view of the new gTLD process looking forward.
Mr. Roberts: I actually enjoy being last on this topic. It’s clear from the comments that this is
intractable. It’s intractable on the scale of Solomon and the Bible. It’s not going to be solved
this afternoon. It’s not even going to be solved this year.
Given that, let me make a few brief comments. If you purse the problem, there are several
dimensions but one of the important dimensions is between those who worry about the
taxonomic integrity and the social acceptability of the name space.
Milton, of course, believes that the space should not have that kind of value to it but he doesn’t
have a lot of company on that point of view. The Internet name space is a public space and a
lot of people care about public spaces.
The FCC, for instance, tried to enforce a rule about the fact that Janet Jackson’s breast was on
TV for one second and we are still having legal libations from that five years later. There is no
question that there is content regulation in the United States and going to be content
regulation on the United States, and even more so overseas.
In fact, it was pretty clear in the .SEX business that if commerce “didn’t do the right thing” that
we were going to have bills to settle the issue. This is a clear example of where there is an area
of ICANN’s apparent responsibility that involves quasi-governmental roles that ICANN is ill-
equipped to deal with.
If you look at the amount of process in the three rounds of expanding the name space we’ve
had, it’s an incredible amount of processing. When you look at bureaucratic organizations and
you see a lot of time lost and a lot of process, you know the reason for that is because it’s an
intractable problem.
Let’s put that to one side and just talk about the commercial angle on it. Outside the U.S. there
is a lot of jealousy about the fact that gTLDs are dominated by American companies. Between
two-thirds and three-quarters of all registry gTLD profits flow to American companies.
Furthermore, a lot of non-US people see the dominance of trademark and branding, especially
in American multi-national corporations, as being evidence of America’s evil mercantile empire.
How is poor ICANN going to cope with that kind of we/they pulling and hauling?
The current exercise is an effort to try to narrow things down and let’s see if we can’t get the
multi-nationals to agree on at least enough TLD’s to buy off the people, what is left of the
entrepreneurial spirit in the country after the fall of capitalism like last week the New York
Times decreed the fall of capitalism in the United States, so that there will be peace in our time.
Who knows what there will be. There was temporary peace when we did seven out of 48 on
the basis about nobody knew whether the Internet was going to collapse or not if we had any
new TLDs but we demonstrated there was barely a ripple. I think Paul and his successor are in a
very uncomfortable position of attempting to preside over a process for which there are only
partial solutions.
Mr. Palage: Thank you, Mike. Just on this one note, I think on all the other topics we kind of
had a good, if you will, balance of opinions. On this last topic I would say the panel was very
pro-new TLD.
I guess I’ll sort of try to provide the other balance because as an intellectual property attorney
and someone who has been involved with launching three new gTLDs over the last 10 years. I
am supportive of a responsible expanse of the name space. I think what the global
community—the global business community is concerned is just a duplication of the name
space. I do want to see the innovation. I do want to see choice. I just don’t want to see
duplication. I am hopeful that the IRT, which is released in a report today, can hopefully pave
the way forward.
David, getting back to that consensus driven approach that was so important back during the
UDRP days. With that, we have time. We’re not going anywhere so we now would like to
actually turn this time over to you, the people in the audience, to ask the panelists any
questions that you may have.
V. Questions & Answers

Mr. Szoka: Thank you all. I’m going to come around. [Adam] Marcus and I are going to take
questions from the audience. I first want to exercise my prerogative as shadow moderator and
ask two questions.
First, Mike, I wonder if you could explain and expand a little bit on what you mean by
duplication of the domain name space and talk about the current need for defensive
registrations and how considerable the expense for that could be if you start talking about
creating hundreds of new gTLDs and what kind of solutions you think might create a balance
between duplication, which in your view is bad, and responsible expansion.
Mr. Roberts: Sure. Again, I have testified as an expert for a number of large global companies,
most recently, for 3M. 3M has a trademark domain name portfolio of around 15,000 names, 95
percent of which they don’t want, they don’t need.
They have just sort of had to defensively register these names to protect against consumer
confusion and to protect their brands. I think that is a concern of a lot of global brands,
particularly in the current economic downturn they are concerned about how this will impact
their bottom lines. As I said, ICANN is in a good position. They just announced 20 positions that
they are hiring. A lot of the rest of the business community is actually laying people off. This
idea of a financial burden is the result of having to defensively register in a couple of hundred
new gTLDs is a concern.
Now, again, this is a topic I had before. Again, I recognize a trademark owner’s right.
Trademark owner’s rights are not a monopoly. I think that is one of the problems that we have
sort of had with the sunrises. We have always gotten into this mindset of duplicating the name
space. Again, I want choice. I do want innovation. Hopefully, as I said, we’ll be looking to what
the IRT proposes and be commenting on that.
Mr. Szoka: My second question, before we turn to the audience, is you mentioned ICANN is
hiring new staff. I understand that ICANN’s budget has also grown pretty considerably. Mike
Roberts mentioned that his prediction that ICANN’s budget would exceed that of the
International Telecommunications Union, and so it has.
Okay, Paul. I think ICANN’s budget is currently at $67 million and is expected to rise to over
$100 million. I would be curious to hear Paul’s thoughts, as well as anybody else’s, about
ICANN’s growing budget and its financial stake in the gTLD expansion.
Mr. Twomey: Let’s talk about that a little bit. First of all, it’s nothing like the IT’s budget so let’s
be clear about that. It’s something like 25% of the IT’s budget.
I had a conversation with Sam Bodman, the Deputy Secretary of Commerce, in 2003. We were
doing the MOU process in 2003. Sam was very interesting. He was emphatic about the point.
The point he made was that in the long run while institutions and companies sort of drive the
world and drive outcomes, volunteer approaches don’t.
I think one of the things I’ve seen in the ICANN experience has been perfected, I think, in other
parts by John Aaron. I think we’ve seen during the end of the ‘90s coming into the 2000s that
on the Internet space there was a change from the volunteer academic part that was an
incredible part but more of a commercialization, institutionalization process.
I think ICANN has been one example of that and I would be happy for people to argue about
whether it’s done in a good way or bad way but I think it’s been part of that affliction.
Sam Bodman’s view is that the ICANN budget should be $200 million in 2003 which I disagreed
with fairly emphatically. But, nevertheless, there has been an issue and we talked quite openly
with the community over a period of time that the things the community were asking us to do
should be cost resources. I think Mike would have understood completely that you simply can’t
operate without resources.
The operating budget for this year is $51 million. The operating budget for next year if $54
million. This is the expenditure side which is only a 6% increase. We did have quite big
increases and I was quite open with the community that we needed a big increase. We had 20
something percentage increases for several years in a row but that has now come down and
next year increase is a 6% change increase.
We have been in the process of booting a reserve. We did not have any reserve funds so the
revenue line for the cost of this year is $67 million. I’ve got to say this all has to be approved
through a process with the community and also a vote by the registrars.
But also, probably importantly, our revenue structure is based around the revenue structures
between the registrars and the registries and the country code operators. If their businesses
actually go down this year, our revenue will go down this year. We are not quite certain what
that is.
Probably more interestingly is actually where the money is spent because it gives you some
idea of what has actually changed in terms of the demands. Roughly this year about 34%, 35%
of the revenue of the budget is spent on gTLDs or new gTLD prices. That was taking on board,
like I said, about the complexity of the problem in front of us. That is where some of the
expansion has gone.
About 17% is spent, or 18% is spent on country code and country code related issues. The at-
large process is roughly about 7% of the budget. The government advisory committee process
is about 7% of the budget. I could keep going on.
I think what I am trying to reflect is the two big things which are basically internationalized
domain names and new gTLDs and the related communities involved with that process by
taking that 50% of expenditure. That will vary at the time depending on what the issues are.
It’s a good question. We need to remain accountable but we need to understand that the
budget is driven not because we want lots of money. It’s driven by what the community itself
says the issues are.
Mr. Palage: Paul, during my three years on the ICANN board I was on the finance committee
and Paul and I could probably go back and forth right now. I will be submitting comments next
week in response to Kevin’s call with regard to the budget. What I would like to do is use this
time for people in the audience to perhaps interact.
Steve DelBianco, NetChoice: Thanks. I was struck by David’s analogy to the parable of the
prodigal son. I was dying to know where you were going with that. That parable is about a
son who is endowed with a great foundation of assets, goes out on his own and lives the
experimental life, makes a mess of it all, gets lost, and then comes home to the joyous welcome
from a forgiving father. Right?
I’m thinking about the term, “experimental living.” Ten years ago, the son left home with the
White Paper under arm and we saw some experimental living, too: the forced march of GNSO
Reform; experiments with new TLDs; the inability to really pull together institutional
confidence measures.
Maybe what’s really happened is that the son, after 10 years, has come home because, frankly,
a lot of the companies that provide transit, resolution, registration, all the content and
commerce and all their customers ran to the U.S. Government and said, “Look, the
accountability mechanisms in this experiment aren’t working.”
What did Milton call it? A “playpen for suckers?” Sometimes it feels that way. I’m in the
playpen with you all the time. If that’s the case, then the prodigal son, has he come home? If
he has come home, what accountability mechanisms do we have?
What happens when the son leaves home next? What are the new accountability mechanisms
the second time this prodigal son goes out on his own?
Mr. Johnson: That’s a great question. I want to answer it by saying the prodigal son is still out,
as you heard, with the budget numbers having a high old time. I’m actually hopeful partially
because of what Mike Roberts says about now retractable these problems are and how bad it
would be if ICANN were to systematically try to expand its regulatory role.
I am hopeful that at some point people will realize that the way to solve a lot of these problems
is to have ICANN say, “That is not our job. We’re not doing that.” And to have the U.S.
Government say to ICANN we support you in not taking on everything that everyone asks you
to do and they may come home to the fundamental very limited mission in which case I would
welcome them.
Mr. Palage: Anyone else? Milton?
Mr. Mueller: Well, I never claimed that it was a prodigal son. I think—yeah, coming home I
think the main perspective difference between you and me is that I think the tether to the U.S.
is part of the problem rather than part of the solution. I don’t think the accountability is going
to be enforced properly through the Commerce Department. That was one of the problems.
That was supposed to be a two-year temporary transitional thing and then it was supposed to
be creating this new institutional structure that had its own forms of accountability. Where is
that? Well, it was morphed and evolved and—you know, I think we have to do something. We
have to make a decision coming up on September 2009. We all will have our filings and
comments about what we think the proper decision is.
I certainly wouldn’t want to say that an acceptable solution is for it to simply be perceived as a
U.S. Government contractor. Again, we’re getting back this globalism, global inter-connected,
the need to transcend the nation/state system somehow. We just have to do that if this is the
Internet.
Mr. Szoka: Any other questions?
Kostas Liopiros, Sun Fire Group: Just to follow up on your question. What is the role of the ITU
in the function of ICANN or spinning off the basic functions that you might not be involved with
to some other international agency?
Mr. Mueller: Well, the ITU is frequently invoked as a boogey man to scare people into either
loving ICANN or loving the United States. The short answer to your question is the ITU really
has no role, even though it would very much like to have a role in coordinating the Internet. It’s
a separate institution.
It has a very long history of coordinating telephone numbering and other traditional telecom
physical standards but it lacks both the expertise and the history to take over the Internet
coordination functions in any realistic way so it’s not really an option and it never really has
been an option. It was a danger for a few months in 1996 when the gTLD MOU was bruted but
it was shot down very quickly. Even WSIS, which came out of a purely intergovernmental
setting, pointedly refused to ever even recommend or consider turning it all over to the ITU. I
don’t think that’s really an option.
Mr. Roberts: I would like to make a couple of points in addition and go back to the original
comment in the beginning of the session about the do no harm. There is an argument to be
made. I don’t know that I am particularly signed up for it but there is an argument that says
when you have something that is as technologically mobile as the Internet is and where the
harnessing of innovation by the Internet and in the Internet is so important to economic
development and welfare. You need to be exceptionally cautious about establishing
bureaucratic institutions around an effort like ICANN.
In other words, this is a version of the ICANN should be weak argument because then they can’t
get us in trouble. You know, like a lot of these things there is a grain of truth in there
somewhere. I know for a fact, and Paul and I have talked about this, that because of the
aspirations of so many millions and millions of people for the Internet as an instrument of social
justice, whoever heads up ICANN is given whether he or she wants it or not a mantle of
governance that fits uncomfortably and yet can’t be denied.
The aspirations can’t be denied so it’s very difficult to find a path through this. Don’t do any
harm but don’t make people think that the Internet has become just another economic tool of
big important rich people.
Mr. Twomey: I think the more fundamental question is about the member states of the UN
system. What you have seen over a period of time member states argue quite strongly at
certain stages that what they wanted was some alternative to this multi-stakeholder model
often reflecting their own domestic situation that domestically they don’t like running the
world but why do they want to run internationally that way.
The link to the U.S. Government has been things people have pointed to in many ways of being
a further justification as to why they didn’t like that model. They pushed quite strongly the
WSIS. That was a new-run thing.
The ITU has still got those member states pushing for acceptance since the ITU has just set up
an Internet governance committee of the council so it’s not quite true. There are actually steps
inside the ITU for them to have more roles on the Internet.
The real issue I don’t think is sort of an ICANN versus ITU. It’s hooked back at what the forces
are at the member state level. People at the moment are going along with this because it’s
been a reinforcement, because it’s global and it’s multi-stakeholder, and because it has this
global Internet.
If there are forces there that would quite like to Balkanize, they would be very happy to have
this with a series of license agreements around it. That is really the alternative so I don’t
think—we tend to say ICANN or ITU or ICANN or something else. It’s not that. It’s ICANN or
190 license arrangements is how I think about it really. That’s what we should keep in mind.
Mr. Szoka: Thanks, Paul. We’re going to have one more question and then we’re going to
thank our panel for coming.
Andrew Mack, AMGlobal Consulting: Thanks very much. Sorry for everybody who didn’t get a
chance. My name is Andrew Mack. I’m with AM Global here in Washington. I guess my
question is around the JPA and what, if any, flexibility you think there is. I’ve heard it described
as a done deal. I wanted to know is it an all or nothing? Is there any flexibility? Where do you
see that going by September?
Mr. Palage: I can start off. Paul, this is one of the questions I was going to ask. When I look at
ICANN I have attended a number of events and ICANN has made the acknowledgement that the
JPA will expire in September.
Generally in that same breath, ICANN will also say that it looks forward to a continued working
relationship with the USG going forward and maintaining that special relationship that it has
throughout the years. I guess my question is when I look on the ICANN website, ICANN now is
actively engaging in MOUs with other entities, with the United Nations, one of the UN agencies.
They have entered into a relationship. I guess my question is, okay, if the JPA ends, is there any
reason why we might not want to formalize another type of relationship whether it’s an MOU.
As I said, ICANN has entered into MOUs with other people so I guess why would it be adverse to
entering into some type of arrangement, contractual or whatever, memorandum of
understanding, with the USG. That’s just kind of my question and then I’ll just let everybody go
down. Paul, we’ll give you the last word on this one.
Mr. Roberts: Well, I think, as I said in my earlier remarks, that the original MOU in the JPA
really characterize a relationship that never existed. Milton has pointed out the difficulties with
what the paperwork says and what the reality of it was. From sort of a purist point of view, my
reaction would be let’s clean up our act here and get straight on both sides who is doing what.
Mr. Mueller: You know, we really have tried to come out very clearly on the JPA question. We
still think ICANN needs some forms of external accountability. We are not enthusiastic about a
continued U.S. Government role.
Again, we think that’s part of the problem because it encourages domestic political forces to
bypass the ICANN process and bias[es] it towards the U.S., and it brings in the political interest
of other governments in ways that threaten the integration or compatibility of the Internet.
But we are not comfortable with where ICANN is now so it’s not an easy decision to make.
Mr. Szoka: David, a brief word.
Mr. Johnson: I think you have to distinguish between several different questions. One is
whether the contents of what the world is treating as the authoritative root will remain subject
to a process that involves a contract between, in fact, the U.S. Government and VeriSign and a
different question which is will the community of registries and registrars look to ICANN to
agree to policies that they have to abide by and will ICANN or anybody else agree to a contract
that says the U.S. gets to say what those policies must be. That last part it seems to me is not
tenable over the long term.
Mr. Szoka: Paul, you have the last word.
Mr. Twomey: Picking up on what David said, first and foremost the process of managing the
roots zone system covered by IANA procurement contracts created with VeriSign. We don’t see
that changing. We think that is at the core of that relationship and it is also, frankly, at the core
of the history of the evolution of where this came from. That is with the NSF contract came
from originally with John.
The MOU JPA process was a different and unique thing. It’s not something you can track back
20 or 30 years and it was really a due diligence process about the evolution of the institution. If
you look at the instrument now, it’s two pages long. If you actually look at the USG
responsibilities there are three things.
Both responsibilities will move much more onto the board ICANN in enforcing that series of
things that’s under resolutions. We are not talking about transitioning from or changing. If on
the first of October the government is finished, nothing is going to be different. I mean, there’s
not going to be any real difference. It’s a question of what is the nature of the engagement
with the community in which we keep saying—I’m very strong with the view—the more people
understand the ways, the way to be involved is actually do it inside the ICANN process itself and
be accountable for it is the key. The U.S. Government relationship, particularly around the root
zone stuff is separate and that stays very clear with the IANA contracts.
Mr. Szoka: Thanks, Paul. Thank you all for coming. Thank you to our panel.
VI. Speaker Biographies

David R. Johnson is a Visiting Professor at New York Law School’s Institute for Information Law
and Policy, where he runs the program leading to a certificate of mastery of law practice
technology. Johnson recently retired from Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering where his practice
focused primarily on the emerging area of electronic commerce, including counseling on issues
relating to privacy, domain names and Internet governance issues, and jurisdiction. Johnson
served as Founding Director of the Aspen Institute Internet Policy Project and as Founding
President, CEO, and Chairman of Counsel Connect, an online meeting place for the legal
profession. Johnson has served on the boards of directors of the National Center for
Automated Information Research and the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction. He is
a Co-Founder of the Law Practice Technology Roundtable. He serves on the Advisory Board of
Legal OnRamp. Johnson is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School.
Dr. Milton Mueller is Professor at Syracuse University School of Information Studies and was
recently appointed XS4All Professor at the Technology University of Delft, specializing in the
Security and Privacy of Internet Users, a part-time position running concurrently with his
appointment at Syracuse. He founded the Internet Governance Project, a consortium of
university scholars working on global Internet policy issues. His widely read book Ruling the
Root: Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace was published by MIT Press in 2002.
His new book Networks and States: The global politics of Internet governance will be released
by MIT Press in early 2010. Mueller has been active in ICANN, WSIS civil society, and the new
Internet Governance Forum. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1989.
Michael Palage is an intellectual property attorney, information technology consultant and

Adjunct Fellow at The Progress & Freedom Foundation. He has been actively involved in ICANN
operational and policy matters since its formation in both an individual and leadership role,
including a three-year term on the ICANN Board of Directors. Palage is currently President and
CEO of Pharos Global, Inc., which provides consulting and management services to domain
name registration authorities and other technology related companies. He has testified before
the United States Congress regarding the accuracy and access of domain name WHOIS data,
and as an expert witness in several Internet legal proceedings on behalf of such clients as 3M,
Ford Motor Company, NCAA, and the Florida Attorney General. Palage holds a B.S.E.E. from
Drexel University, and a J.D. from the Temple University School of Law.
Michael Roberts is a policy consultant in the field of Internet technology, services and product
development and currently serves as a consultant to the EDUCAUSE Network Policy Council.
Roberts was the first President and CEO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (ICANN), serving from its inception in 1998 until March 2001. From 1986-96, he was
Vice President at EDUCOM, a consortium of 600 universities and colleges with interests in
information technology, and was for a number of years staff director of the EDUCOM
Networking and Telecommunications Task Force. Roberts was also a founder and the first
director of Internet2, and a co-founder, Trustee and first Executive Director of the Internet
Society. Prior to joining EDUCOM, he was at Stanford University where he was Deputy Director
of Information Technology Services, with executive responsibilities in Stanford’s computing,
communications, and information systems programs. Roberts is a liberal arts graduate of
Stanford, holds an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and is a retired Captain
in the United States Navel Reserves.
Paul Twomey served as President and CEO of ICANN from 2003 to June 2009. Before joining
ICANN, he was the founder of Argo P@cific, a high-level international advisory and investment
firm that assists both Fortune 500 companies and start-up companies to build global Internet
and technology businesses and strategic alliances. Prior to that, Twomey was founding Chief
Executive Officer of the National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE), and the Australian
federal government’s Special Adviser for the Information Economy and Technology. He was also
Australia’s representative at international fora, such as the World Trade Organisation, the OECD
and APEC. During this time, Dr. Twomey was closely involved with ICANN, serving as Chair of
the Governmental Advisory Committee. Prior to his appointment as CEO of NOIE, Dr. Twomey
was Executive General Manager, Europe, of Austrade, the Australian Trade Commission.
Twomey holds a BA from the University of Queensland, a MA from Pennsylvania State
University and a PhD in International Relations from the University of Cambridge.
VII. Glossary of ICANN-Related Terms

Term Definition
ALAC ICANN At-Large Advisory Committee
APNIC Asia Pacific Network Information Centre, one of five Regional Internet Registries
ARIN American Registry for Internet Numbers, one of five Regional Internet Registries
ASCII American Standard Code for Information Interchange, the set of characters that can
currently be used in domain names
ASO Address Supporting Organization, one of the three ICANN supporting organizations
BGC ICANN Board Governance Committee
ccNSO Country Code Supporting Organization, one of three ICANN supporting organizations
ccTLD Country Code Top-Level Domain, e.g., .US (United States), .UK (United Kingdom)
DAG ICANN’s Draft Applicant Guidebook, which details the process of applying for new
gTLDs
DNS Domain Name System
DNSO Domain Name Supporting Organization, an initial ICANN supporting organization that
was later split into the Country-Code Names Supporting Organization and Generic
Names Supporting Organization
DNSSEC DNS Security Extensions, a set of security extensions for the current domain name
system
DoC U.S. Department of Commerce
Domain The human-readable name assigned to a computer on the Internet; examples:
name icann.org, whitehouse.gov, microsoft.com
GAC ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee
GAO U.S. General Accountability Office
GNSO Generic Names Supporting Organization, one of three ICANN supporting organizations
gTLD Generic Top-Level Domain (e.g., .COM, .EDU, .GOV)
IANA Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, oversees global IP address allocation and root
zone management for the DNS. IANA is currently an operating unit of ICANN
ICANN Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers
IDN Internationalized Domain Name, a domain name with characters not included in the
ASCII character set
IETF Internet Engineering Task Force
IP Internet Protocol
IPv4 Internet Protocol version 4
IPv6 Internet Protocol version 6
Term Definition
IRT ICANN Implementation Recommendation Team, whose 24 experts are responsible for
developing and proposing trademark protections for the new gTLD process
ITU International Telecommunication Union, a UN agency established to standardize and
regulate international radio and telecommunications
JPA Joint Project Agreement between the United States government and ICANN
LACNIC Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry, one of the five Regional
Internet Registries
MoU The Memorandum of Understanding between the United States government and
ICANN assigning IANA responsibility to ICANN. It was first drafted in 1998 and was
amended six times from 1999 to 2003, when it was superseded by the JPA.
NRO Number Resource Organization, an international non-governmental organization
composed of the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs)
NTIA National Telecommunications & Information Administration, an agency in the U.S.
Department of Commerce, is the executive branch agency principally responsible for
advising the President on telecommunications and information policies
Registry/ A registry maintains the authoritative list of domain names in a specific TLD. For
registries example, VeriSign is the registry for the .com and .net TLDs.
Registrar/ Registrars handle the process of registering domain names in one or more registries.
registrars While there can be several registrars providing domain registration services for a single
TLD, there can be only one registry for each TLD.
Registrant An individual/entity that wishes to or has registered a domain name with a registrar
RFC Request For Comment, a memorandum published by the IETF as an Internet standard
RIPE Réseaux IP Européens, one of the five Regional Internet Registries
RIR Regional Internet Registry. There are five RIRs: APNIC, ARIN, LACNIC, and RIPE
RSSAC ICANN Root Server System Advisory Committee
SSAC ICANN Security and Stability Advisory Committee
sTLD Sponsored Top-Level Domain (e.g., .AERO, .ASIA, .COOP, .JOBS, .MOBI, .TRAVEL)
UPU Universal Postal Union, a UN agency established to coordinate postal policies among
member nations
USC University of Southern California
USG United States Government
WSIS World Summit on Information Society, a pair of UN-sponsored conferences on the
information society and bridging the digital divide that took place in 2003 in Geneva
and 2005 in Tunis
VIII. Background Charts

The following charts were graciously provided by Steve DelBianco, Executive Director of
NetChoice (www.netchoice.org).
A. Timeline of Internet Governance

B. Diagram of Internet Governance
C. Internationalized Domain Names

Related PFF Publications

New gTLDs: Let the Gaming Begin, Part I: TLD Front-Running, Michael Palage,
Progress on Point 16.17, July 2009.
Comments on the NTIA’s ICANN Notice of Inquiry, Michael Palage, June 2009.
ICANN’s Economic Reports: Finding the Missing Pieces to the Puzzle, Michael Palage,
Progress Snapshot 5.4, June 2009.
ICANN’s Implementation Recommendation Team for New gTLDs: Safeguards
Needed, Michael Palage, Progress on Point 16.10, Mar. 25, 2009.
ICANN’s “Go/ No-Go” Decision Concerning New gTLDs, Michael Palage, Progress on
Point 16.3, Feb. 17 2009.
ICANN’s Game of Chicken with the USG & The Need for Adult (GAO) Supervision,
Michael Palage, PFF Blog, Dec. 22, 2008.
ICANN’s gTLD Proposal Hits a Wall: Now What?, Michael Palage, PFF Blog, Dec. 22,
2008.
The Progress & Freedom Foundation is a market-oriented think tank that studies the digital revolution and its
implications for public policy. Its mission is to educate policymakers, opinion leaders and the public about issues
associated with technological change, based on a philosophy of limited government, free markets and civil liberties.
Established in 1993, PFF is a private, non-profit, non-partisan research organization supported by tax-deductible
donations from corporations, foundations and individuals. The views expressed here are those of the authors, and do not
necessarily represent the views of PFF, its Board of Directors, officers or staff.
The Progress & Freedom Foundation  1444 Eye Street, NW  Suite 500  Washington, DC 20005
202-289-8928  mail@pff.org  www.pff.org

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Progress on Point

Volume 16, Issue 15 August 2009