NETmundial Laid Multistakeholder Groundwork for ITU Plenipotentiary, Say Strickling, Sepulveda

Obama administration officials dismissed perceived misnomers about NTIA’s transition of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) and argued at an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) conference on Internet governance Tuesday that the transition has made impossible calls for intergovernmental control of those functions. The event was webcast from the think tank’s Washington conference center. Academics and domain experts warned of an increasing climate in favor of government control for Internet governance that could threaten to derail the progress of the multistakeholder model. It’s “possible” that the State Department could become involved in a legal proceeding on the requested aquisition of the country code top-level domains for Iran, North Korea and Syria in lieu of unpaid damages to the victims of terror attacks involving those nations, said Daniel Sepulveda, deputy assistant secretary of state for economic and business affairs. Sepulveda said he’s looking into the case.

The debate on the transition should be based on “facts,” which don’t include the “notion” that the U.S. controls the Internet, said NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling (http://1.usa.gov/1o6MQyh). The IANA functions are not the “property” of the U.S., as some have suggested, he said: “We do not own the Domain Name System and we cannot give away what we do not own.” The IANA transition “will strengthen the multistakeholder process and will result in ICANN’s becoming even more directly accountable to the customers of the IANA functions,” said Strickling. The transition hasn’t “emboldened authoritarian governments” but has “arguably had the opposite effect,” he said. Only Russia and Cuba openly opposed the multistakeholder document (http://bit.ly/1kaB4TW) produced at the Internet governance conference NETmundial (CD April 28 p13; April 24 p7; April 23 p19), said Strickling. NTIA’s authority over IANA was often used by Russia and other countries as an “excuse” for the ITU and other organizations to “take over” the functions, he said: “Our announcement took that argument off the table.”

NETmundial created a multistakeholder “precedent” for the ITU Plenipotentiary in Busan, South Korea, beginning Oct. 20 (http://bit.ly/V4kHwI), said Sepulveda. He said he’s “very optimistic” about the plenipotentiary and expects the first week to be dominated by elections for different ITU positions, followed by two weeks of ITU committee meetings. Sepulveda said Russia or a Middle Eastern nation could submit plenipotentiary proposals calling for more centralized authority over Internet-related matters. The State Department is working with developing, democratic countries to ensure a “majority” of support at the plenipotentiary against “censorship and political oppression,” he said.

The challenge “we all collectively face” on Internet governance is a “rising tide” of more government “regulation,” said David Gross, Wiley Rein partner, citing French proposals at ICANN 50 for a restructuring of the organization (CD July 1 p3). The multistakeholder model “must be accepted globally,” but that’s “not going to be easy going forward,” said Gross, clarifying that it’s a “challenge, not an outcome.” ICANN, the entity that coordinates IANA functions, has “done a great job so far” of resisting the “temptation” to solve a French “trade issue” related to .wine and .vin (CD July 7 p11), said Steve DelBianco, NetChoice executive director. Other governments need to “understand” which issues should and shouldn’t be addressed through ICANN, he said.

It’s “very easy” to assume a continuance of the Internet’s meteoric rise and the “economic growth” that follows it, said Laura DeNardis, American University communications professor. “We can’t take that for granted. Internet governance is always in flux,” she said. There’s a “temptation around the world to interject more government intervention” in Internet governance, given the inability to separate the Internet’s technical functions from its policy considerations, said DeNardis: “This is the worst-case scenario for the future of the Internet.” The IANA transition needs “more engineers” and “less lawyers,” said Shane Tews, visiting fellow at the AEI’s Center for Internet, Communications, and Technology Policy.

ICANN’s IANA-related Coordination Group acquiesced to the Governmental Advisory Committee’s (GAC) request for 5 members to be appointed to the group (CD July 8 p6; June 27 p7), said the group in a letter (http://bit.ly/1mAVEal) to GAC Chair Heather Dryden, which was released in a news update (http://bit.ly/1t4tJ8m) by ICANN Monday. The group held its first meeting in London July 17-18 and released a draft charter (http://bit.ly/1rbABkJ) after its first meeting. The draft declares four primary tasks for the group, including developing a “complete proposal for the transition,” it said.