'Limited Window' for Congressional Intervention Against IANA Transition, Cruz Says

Only a “limited window of time” remains for Congress to intervene to stop the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition from occurring as scheduled Sept. 30, said Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, during a Heritage Foundation-TechFreedom event Thursday. Cruz has led Senate skeptics of the IANA transition, most recently by bowing the Protecting Internet Freedom Act (S-3034) last month. S-3034 and its House companion (HR-5418) would prohibit NTIA from allowing the IANA transition unless Congress “expressly grants” the NTIA administrator the authority to allow it (see 1606080044).

Congressional intervention to delay the IANA transition is needed to at least better vet what critics view as the Obama administration's “giveaway” of the IANA functions and oversight of the Domain Name System to ICANN, given the role that foreign governments have within the nonprofit as part of its Governmental Advisory Committee, Cruz said. The changes to ICANN's accountability mechanisms that the board approved in March in connection with the organization's IANA transition plan include a requirement that the board reject consensus GAC advice via a 60 percent majority vote (see 1603090059), which Cruz characterized as an increase in government influence within ICANN. He also raised concerns about the nonprofit's commitment to maintaining headquarters in Los Angeles because a move overseas would remove ICANN from U.S. court jurisdiction.

Cruz cited China, Iran and Russia as potential future threats via their involvement in GAC. He questioned what is “going through the minds” of the Obama administration in choosing to allow the IANA transition to occur, since the U.S. has maintained the internet “as an oasis of freedom.” Cruz pointed to ICANN Senior Adviser to the President-Governmental Affairs Tarek Kamel's involvement in the organization to call into question whether it will commit to free speech post-transition. Kamel was Egypt's minister of communications and information technology during the period in 2011 when Egypt restricted access to the internet during the Arab Spring revolution that toppled the government of then-President Hosni Mubarak. Now-former ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé defended Kamel in 2014 against criticism of his role in Egypt's government, saying Kamel “put his life on the line” to convince the Mubarak government to restore internet access. NTIA continues to believe “that the best way to preserve and strengthen the free and open Internet is by completing the long-planned privatization of the Internet’s domain name system,” a spokeswoman said in a statement. ICANN didn't comment.

ACT|The App Association President Jonathan Zuck disputed Cruz's portrayal of the IANA transition, saying the U.S. “gave away the internet” in the 1980s during President Ronald Reagan's administration. The IANA transition, by contrast, is merely “updates to a spreadsheet” that won't fundamentally affect how IANA and the DNS function. TechFreedom President Berin Szoka said he doesn't think the IANA transition is fundamentally problematic but said he believes both ICANN and the Obama administration have been rushing the transition through for “purely political” reasons. “I am against political naiveté,” Szoka said. “This may be our last chance” to evaluate whether the post-transition ICANN is robust enough to resist undue government influence and other potential hazards.