Last week, nearly 3,500 people met in London to discuss management of the internet. Yet judging from the media coverage, it was less newsworthy than the arrival of an app called Yo. Apart from a flare-up from a French government minister at one point of proceedings (on protecting wine domains), the whole show went largely unnoticed.



The occasion was the 50th meeting – and the first in the UK – of Icann, the 16-year-old organisation that manages the internet’s centralised domain name and numbering system. Is that boring or what? Well, perhaps, but as the US TV talk-show host John Oliver said recently, on another vitally important but soporific-sounding topic – that of net neutrality – “if you want to do something evil, put it inside something that sounds incredibly boring …”

So what is the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann)? It’s a private Californian company, established by the US government in 1998, which sits atop the lucrative domain name industry. (The one that allows you to register putinarainbow.com for an annual fee.) After the explosion in domain names this year from the original group of 22 (.net, .org, etc) to over 1,000 (.manythings), Icann’s annual revenue is soaring - close to $300m at last count.



The business of giving title to these digital landholdings has made Icann a plush operation – as evidenced by the slick event at the Hilton Metropole (complete with lavish free social programme). But all corporate beanfeasts are lavish. So what’s the problem?

Simply this: Icann isn’t a corporation competing with others for a share of its market. Instead, it’s a centralised, monopolistic, hardly accountable private organisation that exercises public authority and power. At the same time that it’s providing services to the domain name industry, it is also trying to regulate it. On top of that, it claims to be “dedicated to keeping the internet secure, stable and interoperable.” Think about that, and the realities of the surveilled internet, as you digest how Icann operates.

We know from history and economics that monopolies in private hands never act in the public interest. Icann, however, masterfully avoids this topic by appealing to amorphous, unenforceable notions of accountability to the “global community”; something they try to capture with the ugly term “multistakeholderism”.

The real problem with this poorly defined notion is that, in practice, it serves powerful incumbents and the centrally positioned US government, diffusing talk of any genuinely representative global alternative for policy-making and oversight. Participants in Icann, who still can’t quite believe their luck, will defend the model to the hilt, regardless of where it’s been and where it’s taking us.

Take, for example, the starting statement of the senior US official Larry Strickling, which is standard fare at Icann meetings: “No one country, no two countries, no 10 countries can claim to speak on behalf of the public interest.”

Now, what exactly do governments speak for, if not the public interest? And what does Icann offer instead? Its hardly pacifying alternative is an unelected, self-interested, self-legitimised corporate board, answerable, when it really comes down to it, only to itself and the attorney general of California.

The UK communications minister, Ed Vaizey, played right into Icann’s pocket: “Just imagine an internet that relied on governments agreeing on things,” he said, suggesting that the result would be “top-down, centralised decision-making: a bureaucratic worldwide web of red tape. The internet being run not by the people who make it work on a daily basis but by horse-trading politicians behind closed doors.”

Putting aside Vaizey’s rather bizarre characterisation of governments (and by implication himself), he overlooks many important layers here. And he seems to have forgotten that the mobile phone network, which relies on governments agreeing on things, does work rather well, and has grown rapidly and affordably worldwide, particularly in developing countries.

The permissionless, bottom-up growth and expansion of the internet is something that we all relish. But anyone who attributes this to Icann – or who believes that Icann is run only by techies and not itself centralised, bureaucratic, and susceptible to insider horse-trading and the rapacious intellectual property lobby – is not watching properly.

If this was just about money, it might not matter. But it points to a deeper problem. Icann has made itself the central manager of the furniture of the internet - from the IP addresses of each connected device to the root servers that tune to Icann’s single root zone and domain name system.

These are some of the most powerful strategic assets on the planet. They are intrinsic to the internet experience that we all value, but also to the fears - surveillance, incumbency, inequality - that we harbour. And right now these assets (themselves a distracting mirage from greater power held by the NSA, Google, and others) are being bartered in a disturbingly one-directional manner.

Today, the ultimate backstop control over key global internet resources rests with the US government. Actions are afoot to transfer them to the so-called global community (while keeping Icann as a private US company, subject only to US law). But the US government has expressly removed from the table a seemingly obvious alternative steward: the United Nations, despite its imperfections. That leaves Icann, with all its hopeless conflicts, as the only option in a vacant lot.

Involving UN-sanctioned bodies, and particularly the International Telecommunication Union, in oversight of the internet, is vigorously opposed by the US and its allies, as well as many in the technical community and moderate governments. But the reasons for this have not been made explicit to differentiate between policy-making, implementation, and oversight. UN processes are supposed to be openly and genuinely negotiated. Accredited non-governmental organisations (of which there are hundreds, if not thousands), can observe sessions, make statements, and engage with governments.

An alternative which gained some minor traction last week is that at the very least Icann shouldn’t be both policy-maker and implementer when it comes to root zone file management. Both these functions and root server oversight require independence from political and economic influence.

Nightmares of some kind of stuttering, stultifying, Stalinist takeover of the root zone - which seems to be the main unstated fear against arms-length UN oversight - are discussed in private, rather than aired in public where structural and functional separation, the reality of UN decision-making, and the likely plausibility of an authoritarian takeover could be more healthily ventilated and proactively insured against.

And don’t anyone question the anathema to Icann’s entire existence: the merits, or otherwise, of a centralised domain name system for internet security and governance at all.

One positive outcome of last week’s meeting was that everyone seemed to acknowledge that Icann needs to work on its accountability. That said, this has been the case since its inception, requiring court cases and endless reviews (this is the fifth in seven years), all to no avail. The byzantine, meandering processes of Icann are engineered in a way that avoids any dissent surfacing, all under the reassuring guise of consensus.

The metaphor currently favoured by President Fadi Chehadé is that Icann has “grown up, and is about to lose its training wheels of US stewardship.” The focus now, he continues, is “fixing the bike.” An astute observer, Jonathan Carver, called out the flaw in this argument, stating “it’s not about training wheels. It’s about accountability tools.” It might be the only broken bike in the lot, but it’s one with a huge degree of unshackled power. We should all question whether Icann is truly capable of serving today’s global internet community before we let it continue on its merry, free-floating way.

Julia Powles is a researcher in law and technology at the University of Cambridge. Find her on Twitter @juliapowles

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