ICANN, accountability and capture

The folks over at Intellectual Property Watch have a couple of extremely interesting (if not very recent) pieces detailing recent discussions and ongoing controversies regarding participation, accountability mechanisms and the role for - and risk of capture by - governments in the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Key to these seem to be the role of the US Government in overseeing the formally private regulatory body. ICANN itself seems keen to distance itself from this oversight, while many industry actors, on the other hand, see it as essential to providing effective accountability for ICANN decisions, and to staving off the risk of capture by other foreign governments, and thus losing the benefits of genuinely private regulation.

In the meantime, to add to this complex set of tensions, some states and other public actors - such as, for example, the UN's International Telecommunications Union - have been highly critical of the current role afforded to governments other than the US through the ICANN's Government Advisory Committee, claiming that its contribution is merely "cosmetic". Which, of course, for the most part suits both industry and the US Government down to the ground.

Few cases exemplify better the "added value" that the shift to understanding global regulation as global administration can bring; or the complexities and tensions of the putatively emerging "global administrative space". We have a formally private body clearly performing a public governance function; its activities are the site of ongoing struggles over the best and most effective way of allocating participatory rights and accountability mechanisms between a wide range of different public and private actors; and its administrative activity - the regulation of the internet - is both evidently a necessarily global endeavour (which simply cannot be accomplished by individual states alone) and one that combines the logics of national security, market efficiency and morality (privacy, fairness, obscenity, etc.) in almost equal measure.

Much more research is needed on this particular topic: the IPWatch articles are, however, a good place to start, as are the chapters by Lorenzo Casini and Bruno Carotti (2.1, 5.4 and 5.5) in the GAL Casebook.

Radical changes in internet governance approved by ICANN

From the BBC, we learn that "a complete overhaul in the way that people navigate the internet" has been approved by ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) during its recent meeting in Paris. The previously strict rules limiting the number of "top-level domain names", such as ".com" or ".co.uk", are to be relaxed, paving the way for more specific suffixes such as, for example ".sport" or ".nyc".

This will create opportunities and risks in equal measure, particularly with regard intellectual property rights. While companies will be able to fully incorporate their brand names within their web addresses, the possibilities for "cybersquatting" - the practice of unfairly registering domain names in order to make money - will be vastly increased. As the Guardian reports, however, the current move will not create anything like a free-for-all; some domain names could cost as much as ₤250,000, and all applications will have to be approved by ICANN.

Increased will of necessity create increased administrative discretion for ICANN; and the increased stakes in play will in turn mean that demands for accountability and transparency from all relevant stakeholders will only grow stronger. Perhaps it was with this in mind that ICANN published, in January of this year, a document detailing its "Frameworks and Principles on Accountability and Transparency". This document is interesting for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that it confronts ICANN's dual role as a private company fulfilling a public governance function, and the ways in which different stakeholders' expectations of accountability can conflict on that basis. In any event, this is clearly of great importance from a GAL-perspective, and deserves detailed attention in its own right; I will blog on it in more detail later in the week.