In his presidents’ report on the weekend, Stuart Lynn, president of ICANN said governments play a unique role in representing the broad public interests of their populations.
“Structural reform of ICANN is long overdue,” Larry Bloch, CEO NetRegistry, told ZDNet Australia. “He [Stuart Lynn] is being very sensible here. Government control is undesirable. However, it is a global body and it is intended to take account of global opinion.”
There seems to be general agreement in Australia on the problems detailed in the report, especially the lack of funding and the “unfair criticisms”.
“Giving government a stake can be the means by which he [Stuart Lynn] can get some government funding. I didn’t realise the funding issue was quite so serious,” said Phillip Hourigan of the digital industries group at Deacons Lawyers. “A lot of the structure is still controlled by volunteer organisations.”
According to Hourigan, ICANN was only accepted based on it not being a government regulated body. “Many people viewed ICANN as the thin end of the wedge in terms of centralised, single control of the Internet, the DNS structure," he said. “There will be greater scepticism because of this government control, but it seems to me they think this is needed to get funding.“
Hourigan also believes the proposal may evoke desired reactions from other agencies. “It may be to entice the root name server bodies to take a more active participation. For example, they’ve had no buy-in from any of the 243 country code top level domains.”
Bloch agrees that it’s better to have ICANN reformed rather than replaced. “Most importantly, this represents an individual that is prepared to get the job done, who is prepared to draw a line in the sand and say ‘this is the way it’s meant to be.’” he said, adding, “If he’s prepared to take on this mission I welcome that, and think it’s a step in the right direction.”
The problems detailed in the ICANN report may hold special significance for auDA, according to Hourigan.
“In Australia, auDA was founded on similar ideals to ICANN, being a non-profit, private organisation that draws members from the wider community,” he said. “So far it’s been reasonably successful, but it will be interesting to see whether they’ll face the same problems as ICANN.”
According to Bloch the focus on ICANN’s mission has been derailed by the involvement of "people with their own peripheral agenda".
"People who have an inflated sense of self-importance, who make a lot of noise on e-mail lists, and therefore have a disproportionate influence on Internet policy,” he said.
“It’s quite easy to see which parties will not be satisfied,” he added. “Those parties which are very vocal on e-mail lists, and Internet techies who feel they still control the Internet. I think there is an over-dominance of input from tech people and it should be brought back into balance.”
This prediction seems to be right on the money. Comments on community forums such as Slashdot seem to think that ICANN is too large, uses too many resources and oversteps its boundaries.
