By: Dr. Milton Mueller, Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Public Policy September 15, 2015 - Full Article as .PDF 1. The IANA Transition On March 14, 2014, the United States government announced its intention to end its direct role in overseeing the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) and IP address allocation. Those aspects of [...]
Amending ICANN's existing corporate bylaws to create a community veto process and a board recall mechanism could empower the ICANN community to over-see the direction of ICANN's board of directors. These bylaws revisions would greatly aid in the organization's effort to be accountable to the community it serves without requiring a radical re-organization of ICANN's legal structure.
* NCSG is concerned by proposals from the IPC and BC to change consensus policy and re-open previously settled policy matters on Rights Protection Mechanisms for new tlds. * The proposal under discussion does not reflect the hard-won balance found in the current consensus policy, nor the traditional limitations that exist in trademark law. * The proposal removes matters from the negotiated RAA and registry agreements into a vague 'backdoor process', and binds ICANN to unlimited compliance obligations. * Both the substance of the proposals and the manner of presenting it directly to ICANN without a proper policy process undermine our shared desire to create a truly multi-equal stakeholder process that honours ICANN's commitment to transparency and accountability.
Cyber-Security Expert Ron Deibert and new ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade Address Non-Commercial Users Policy Conference on Eve of ICANN #45 - Public interest groups involved in ICANN will gather for the event, "ICANN & Internet Governance: Security & Freedom in a Connected World" on Friday 12 October at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel in Toronto, Canada. Sponsored by the Noncommercial Users Constituency (NCUC), the voice of civil society in ICANN, the policy conference will focus on key ICANN policy issues like the need to promote both cyber-security and human rights in the development of global Internet policies. The event kicks-off with a morning address from cyber-security expert Ron Deibert, Director of the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies and The Citizen Lab, an inter-disciplinary research and development hothouse at the University of Toronto. Deibert will address the need to establish a cyber-security strategy for global civil society.
ICANN's Non-Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC) sent a letter to a number of Privacy Commissioners and Data Retention Officers regarding proposed changes to ICANN's Accreditation Agreement with registrars that impact the privacy rights of Internet users everywhere. According to the letter, ICANN's contract exacerbates privacy harms, in particular, "the current requirements in the new draft contracts [...]
ICANN's Non-Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC) today sent a letter to the Judiciary Committee of the US House of Representatives to express concern over the harmful impact from proposed legislation in the US Congress, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). The House Judiciary Committee will likely vote on SOPA tomorrow, and if it passes there and moves to the full US House for approval, the US Congress will take the Internet a significant step backwards, ushering in a new "digital dark ages" of Internet censorship.
ICANN should bake-in to its internal policy development process, consideration of the various interests and stakeholders that can together reach what can be called the 'public interest'. Consider principles that we agree help us to achieve what we think is the 'public interest,' like openness and promoting freedom and making sure the Internet enables education, communication, innovation, exploration ...
IP Justice submitted a statement today in response to the U.S. Department of Commerce National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) regarding its relationship with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). In its submission, IP Justice argued that ICANN needs a better legal framework that will obligate the organization to respect internationally recognized [...]
IP Justice is deeply concerned that ICANN is insufficiently accountable to relevant non-commercial interests. Certain interests, such as business interests (in particular the trademark and domain name industries) are over-represented at ICANN both in structure and in practice. On the other hand, non-commercial interests and individual Internet users are not given the appropriate representation, although some improvements have been made in recent years. There is a real worry that ICANN is an "industry organization" and works predominantly for trademark interests and the domain name industry. Too often non-commercial concerns are ignored by ICANN; without any real "muscle" behind non-commercial interests, ICANN has little incentive to protect those interests in its policy development process...
I had a conversation recently with a person who had been actively engaged at ICANN in its early days but became disillusioned and disengaged after a few years because his participation lead him to the conclusion that ICANN staff manage the organization's board of directors and the "community" via the GNSO and the At-Large Advisory Committee. He said the staff intentionally worked to stir up divisiveness between community participants in order to justify adopting the staff's own agenda. Before I even had the opportunity to say my first word about my own experience with participating at ICANN, this person who hadn't even been at ICANN in nearly 10 years spoke my thoughts and described my own experience about participating at ICANN for the last 5 years as I have. ...