Hearing of the House Judiciary Committee - Stakeholder Perspectives on ICANN: The .sucks Domain and Essential Steps to Guarantee Trust and Accountability in the Internet's Operation

Hearing

Just over a year ago the Obama Administration and specifically the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced plans to transition oversight over the Internet's domain name system to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

The Administration's decision kicked off high-profile debates involving many far-reaching questions that relate to the future security, stability, resiliency and integrity of the global Internet's continued operation.

At the core of NTIA's decision to entrust ICANN with the responsibility of convening the multi-stakeholder process to transition the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions contract away from the United States is its determination that ICANN has matured as an organization.

Presumably, NTIA has concluded that ICANN is not merely likely to conduct itself in a predictable, open, transparent and accountable manner in the future but that it generally exercises sound judgement and conducts itself in this manner already.

Today's hearing before the Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet Subcommittee is the second to focus on aspects of the proposed transition of the IANA functions contract to the global multi-stakeholder community.

Two overarching concerns that should be tested and fully and appropriately validated before concluding any transition are (1) how representative that community is and (2) how effective the community is and will be in the future in compelling ICANN to operate in a manner that benefits not merely a privileged few but all the global users of the Internet.

We will direct our attention today to matters that relate to the processes being implemented by ICANN and affected stakeholders to advance the NTIA's proposal and also to the substantive concerns routinely expressed by a wide array of stakeholders about ICANN's trustworthiness, accountability, execution and transparency of its current and existing duties and initiatives.

Regrettably, many of these issues relate to matters presented to successive leaders of ICANN [and officials at the Commerce Department] for years and yet there remains substantial room for progress towards responsible outcomes.

Despite these matters being neither novel nor unanticipated, ICANN too often fails to appreciate their seriousness and implement corrective measures in advance or determines that it is unable or unwilling to do so.

In at least one instance, the Obama Administration actually aided and abetted efforts within ICANN to expand the influence of foreign governments at the expense of American companies.

We'll hear what happened when the NTIA and the State Department refused to intervene as the governments of Brazil and Peru pressured ICANN's board to deny Amazon's application for the .AMAZON gTLD even though the application was complete and the word was in no way restricted.

The multi-faceted debacle over the .SUCKS gTLD, which has resulted in trademark owners being shaken down for $2,499 or more annually to protect their brands by a registry affiliated with a company in financial default to ICANN, raises many troubling questions including: 1) how the registry gained approval in the first instance; and 2) whether ICANN itself had a financial motive for allowing this bid to proceed.

Beyond this, ICANN's Chief Contract Compliance Officer's recent public request to consumer protection officials in the United States and Canada to investigate the applicant that ICANN just awarded the new domain to demonstrates the absurdity and futility of ICANN's own enforcement processes.

But frustration over ICANN's enforcement and compliance system is not new. For more than a decade, this Committee has worked to encourage ICANN to take meaningful action to suspend the accreditation of registrars who disregard abuse notifications and even those who actively solicit criminal activity. Today, we'll hear testimony from a witness who has documented ICANN's refusal to deal responsibly with registries that profit from the trafficking of counterfeit drugs and even controlled substances like heroin.

Before concluding, I want to commend the witnesses here today and those who worked to submit statements to the Subcommittee for their extraordinary dedication and ongoing efforts to improve ICANN's responsiveness, accountability and transparency.

As one of our experts who wasn't able to join us today observed:

"[w]e think that after more than fifteen years of routinely interacting with each other, ICANN and NTIA may have become a little too close. Only Congress can review what NTIA does and keep pressure on them to make sure the ICANN/IANA transition is not overly influenced or dominated by the agenda of ICANN. Help us ensure that the transition responds to the needs of the much broader community of Internet users and providers."

That's our goal and our obligation.

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