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  [email protected]  www.pff.org

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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.

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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 nonEnglish 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 supercomputing 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.

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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

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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 BernersLee’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

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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 internationalizing 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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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 12year-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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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 quasigovernmental 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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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 illequipped 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

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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

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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

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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 atlarge 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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 name

The human-readable name assigned to a computer on the Internet; examples: 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

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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/ registries

A registry maintains the authoritative list of domain names in a specific TLD. For example, VeriSign is the registry for the .com and .net TLDs.

Registrar/ registrars

Registrars handle the process of registering domain names in one or more registries. 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

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VIII. Background Charts The following charts were graciously provided by Steve DelBianco, Executive Director of NetChoice (www.netchoice.org).

A. Timeline of Internet Governance

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B. Diagram of Internet Governance

C. Internationalized Domain Names

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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  [email protected]  www.pff.org