ICANN

From LINX Public Affairs

Structure

Like most organisations, ICANN is headed by a Board of Directors.

The ICANN Board is subject to oversight by the US Department of Commerce.

The Board is advised by three "supporting organisations", three technical committees, its public participation organisation the At Large Advisory Committee, and its structure for government liaison, the Governmental Advisory Committee. Also of note is the Nominating Committee (NomCom), which selects and appoints certain positions including Board positions.

Supporting Organisations

The three supporting organisations are:

• Country Code Names Supporting Organisation (ccNSO)
  • Voting membership is open to ccTLD Registries, although meetings are mainly open to anyone who shows up at the door.
  • Policy is stated by ccNSO Council, elected from within ccNSO.
  • Membership of ccNSO Council is formally divided up so that each continent has balanced representation.
  • Provided GAC agree and/or governments are not thought to object strongly, ICANN Board is very likely to follow ccNSO's advice on matters within its scope.
• Generic Names Supporting Organisation (gNSO)
  • Policy is set by gNSO Council.
  • Meetings are mainly open to anyone who shows up at the door, but voting for Council membership is organised through formal "Constituencies".
  • The six gNSO Constituencies are
    • gTLD Registries
    • Registrars
    • Commercial and Business
    • Intellectual Property Rights Holders
    • Non-Commercial Users (NCUC)
    • Internet Service & Connection Providers
  • The Registries and Registrars constituencies get double-voting weight within gNSO Council.
  • Each Constituency appoints three people to gNSO Council. Each Constituency is in control of its own membership, applications, elections process etc.
  • Three more members of gNSO Council are appointed by NomCom.
  • Just because a policy is adopted by gNSO Council does not necessarily mean it will be approved by the Board. The Board will note whether the policy is supported by GAC, and will take account of whether there is a genuine consensus within gNSO for a policy, whether it is a carefully tailored compromise or trade-off, or whether it is supported by a coalition and opposed by one or more stakeholder groups.
• Address Supporting Organisation (ASO).
  • Membership of ASO is only open to the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs).
  • The RIRs develop addressing policy within their own bottom-up process.
  • The RIRs have their own, highly secretive, trade body, the Number Resource Organisation (NRO).
  • Although in public the NRO likes to say that it works closely with ICANN, it is probably more true to say that the RIRs maintain a united front through the NRO to keep ICANN out of their affairs as much as possible. This tactic appears successful: through the NRO the RIRs ensure that ASO is "united", and the ICANN Board is therefore extremely likely to follow ASO's advice.

Technical Committees

The technical advisory committees are:

• Stability and Security Advisory Committee (SSAC)
• Root-Server System Advisory Committee (RSSAC)
• Technical Liaison Group (TLG)

Other notable groups

• The Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC)
  • Membership is open to official government representatives only.
  • Some governments send along relatively junior officials; some even send their Ambassador or a Minister.
  • The fact that GAC has only an advisory relationship to the ICANN Board is the main issue of contention within "Internet Governance" debates such as at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS). There is often talk of "strengthening the role of GAC within ICANN"; since GAC is invited to submit its opinion on anything it wishes, this can only mean moving beyond mere advice into some form of active role in decision-making.
  • ICANN points out that the ICANN Board has never failed to follow GAC's advice. This claim is however only possible because GAC operates on a consensus basis (as does the ITU, incidentally), and the US or some other friendly government can usually be relied upon to prevent a consensus where required.
• The At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) is supposed to consist of ordinary users, and represent their interests. However ICANN has never really been able to make this work effectively, and ALAC's role has been steadily downgraded.
• The President's Strategic Advisory Committee is, as it sounds, the personal support and vehicle for the ICANN President.

Current controversies

• Creating a process for deciding whether to approve new gTLD applications
• Deciding whether to allow IDNs in the root
• Review of the operation and make-up of the GNSO
• Reform of WHOIS

Internationalised Domain Names (IDNs)

• This issue is about whether to allow entry into the root of TLDs using UTF-8 character set encoding instead of ASCII.
• This issue is also used as a proxy for policy below the root: many Registries operate the policy that IDNs will be allowed at the second/third level in their Registry once ICANN permits them in the root.
• Although this might not be immediately apparent from some reporting, nobody is opposed in principle to IDNs.
• There are however a number of concerns, in particular questions of how we should cope with similarity:
  • Semantic similarity e.g. should there be a Chinese character TLD for ".com", and if so, should it be a separate domain or just a pointer to .com?
  • Phonetic similarity e.g. same question, .kom
  • Visual/Lexigraphic similarity e.g. same question, .com where the "o" is from the Cyrillic character set not the Latin one, and so is distinguishable to a computer but not to a human reader (note the potential for phishing).
• The division over IDNs is therefore between those who want to resolve key questions before creating IDNs (for fear that the damage of bad decisions will be irreversible otherwise) and those who want to press ahead now and resolve any problems as they arise (for fear that otherwise IDNs will never be approved).

WHOIS policy

• What information should be available on a WHOIS search?
• Civil liberties campaigners and others in NCUC want to restrict it as much as possible.
• The IPR constituency, supported by Business and ISP constituencies, want as much information as possible, and strong enforcement of its accuracy.
• Within GAC, the EU is supporting the privacy interest and the US Government is supporting the law enforcement interest.
• There are perennial suggestions that law enforcement should have elevated privileges.
  • This already exists outside the WHOIS for ccTLDs: if a properly authorised law enforcement officer demands information from a Registry within their jurisdiction, that must be complied with (where "properly authorised" may mean "bearing a court order", depending on the jurisdiction).
  • Within the WHOIS and at a global level, e.g. for gTLDs, this is nonsense, because Registries cannot accredit, let alone authenticate, law enforcement agencies outside their jurisdiction. Indeed, in some countries doing so would be contrary to data protection law.
• GAC has agreed a set of "Principles" for WHOIS data. These include the notion that it should be accurate and sufficient (without quite coming off the fence on "sufficient for what?"). Nonetheless this establishes, almost by accident, the principle that the purpose of whois is to support the public interest in tracing the registrant of a domain name, rather than the registrant's private interest in making available their contact information. Once that has been decided, the civil liberties' community's fate is sealed.

New gTLDs

• This is about reforming the process whereby the ICANN Board shall approve new gTLDs.
• The main supporter of new gTLDs is the Registrar constituency, together with individual Registries that want to expand their scope of operations.
• Everybody else is mainly concerned about security and stability.
• The old-guard position that there should be no more gTLDs appears to have essentially been defeated.