[ga] Bemusement from the UK

["Michael Wild" <mwild@xxxxxxx>]

Watching the ICANN / Verisign exchanges from the UK is a bemusing
experience. I idly wondered how the equivalent UK system operated -
"could this happen over here?" - and found it interesting. It may be that
this is all old hat to most on this list, but the UK system does seem
better .... the registry is run by Nominet, a non-profit organisation
which anyone can join for £100/yr. Many but not all members are
registrars. It currently has 140 staff, ~2800 members, and manages ~4.5M
domains. UK domains can be registered for as little as £3/yr. Nominet has
created a highly competitive registrar market and has an open and
seemingly fair domain name dispute procedure which uses principle-based
arbitration and does not attempt to determine IP issues. 

There seemed to me to be just one critical difference between Nominet and
ICANN. Nominet receives domain registration fee income directly from
registrars, and decides how to use it to manage the UK domain. This gives
it significant authority deriving from that financial power, which it is
able to exercise in the interest of the internet community as a whole.
For the moment it operates the registry itself, but there's no reason in
principle why it could not be outsourced. Legally, it is a private
company limited by guarantee. So the UK domain is privately operated, but
has community-based governance mechanisms with teeth that allow proper
direction of technical operations.

ICANN has of course an international aspect which makes its life more
difficult than that of Nominet. But the current problems with Verisign
stem not from that but from a fundamental governance problem - the
perennial difficulty that the US political process has in injecting
proper consideration of the wider public interest into commercial
operations. This is of course seen not just in ICANN, but in many other
areas such as electricity deregulation, spectrum allocation, GM foods,
privacy, and so on. From the perspective of a complete outsider, too
little attention has been paid to these problems of governance in ICANN.
Now the crunch has come.

The current dispute is a critical test for ICANN; if it fails to behave
according to its avowed principles it will be sidelined as irrelevant, to
the extent it has not been already. Regardless of past shortcomings, to
be at all credible in future it must now use what authority it has to
instruct Verisign, regardless of any financial or other power Verisign
may hold over it. If this fails, it will plainly expose the inadequacy of
the governance structure, but that might well be preferable to a
continuing lame duck. To be fair, the IAB and ISSC reports give hope that
ICANN is preparing to make a stand based on the "consensus policy"
section of the ICANN-Verisign Agreement. But this dispute goes to the
core of what ICANN is about. ICANN is supposed to act in the interest of
the internet community as a whole, but has not really been given
sufficient power to do so. The only antidote to this is an ICANN which
behaves as if it has the power to act, and actually acts, and is seen to
act, in the interest of the whole community. The governance structures
ought to ensure that the wider interests, determined by as fair and open
a process as can be devised, take precedence of narrower interests - they
don't really do that, but ICANN must act as if they do.