Opinion

Time To Reform ICANN For Real Accountability

Peter Roff A former UPI political writer and U.S. News and World Report columnist, Peter Roff is a Trans-Atlantic Leadership Network media fellow. Contact him at RoffColumns AT mail.com and follow him on Twitter @TheRoffDraft.
Font Size:

Despite considerable congressional opposition to the move, the Obama administration is still not backing away from its announcement it will be cutting ICANN loose from its last remaining moorings sooner rather than later.

Formally known as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the group is still tied to the United States – which, after all, not only invented the Internet but gave it to the world – by a contract with an otherwise obscure agency within the United States Department of Commerce. It’s an appropriately thin thread, one that allows other countries and stakeholders to have confidence the Net is free from the heavy-handed control of any government or stakeholder while at the same time assuring that the values that make the Internet work (antipathy to global censorship, freedom of access, free speech) can’t be done away with by a vote of the board.

ICANN is the nerve center of Internet governance. It’s a self-perpetuating body representing stakeholders that makes the rules for everyone, insuring for example that the URL you type into your browser is the one to which you are eventually connected. It has a lot of power.

Cutting it loose from its final connection to the U.S. government would only give it more. This might be why ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade is the only other person outside of Barack Obama’s Internet policy team in a rush to get the deal done by September 30th, the will of Congress and the American people (who, after all, paid for the ‘Net’s creation and have a better claim of “ownership” than anyone else) be damned. In fact, video of Chehade has just surfaced in which he can be seen and heard “slagging off an independent team investigating how the internet will be governed in future,” the U.K. Register reported Tuesday.

None of this has been going down well on Capitol Hill. At a hearing on February 25 Senate Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Thune expressed his concern that what was being proposed involved a lot of leaping and very little looking. The South Dakota Republican said that, “in the absence of the contract with the U.S government, ICANN could become an organization like FIFA – the international soccer organization that is flush with cash, unresponsive to those it supposedly serves, and accountable to no one.”

Even those who aren’t fans of international soccer are at least vaguely aware of the various scandals that have rocked FIFA in the last several years. It’s been bad for the game and bad for the countries involved in the allegations of favoritism, bribery, and other corruption. Thune is right when he says the same could eventually be true of ICANN – which, for example, can generate as much money as it likes simply by rolling out new domain name extensions or by imposing some kind of additional global access fee on the technology companies that own, operate, and oversee the hardware. While nobody would know for sure where the money would go, we know where it would come from: the Internet’s end users.

ICANN says its board is accountable to the stakeholders – but that’s only because it says it is. Stakeholders have no real power in the organization in a legal sense, despite what Chehade has said publicly. Their ability to influence decisions is purely a matter of moral suasion; that, and the sole remaining contract with the U.S. government.

There is a way to change things so that even if ICANN’s contract with the U.S. Government is allowed to lapse, the global Internet community can be assured that the Internet will continue to function as before and will not become captive to a bloc of nations hostile to free thought or to a branch of the United Nations.

Chehade and his allies are resistant to the idea, but ICANN could be made accountable to a group of “members” selected by the various stakeholder organizations that make up the international community. The members would have a say on policy and governance matters and would be the ones with ultimate responsibility and control, assuring that the Board and staff faithfully implement the policies promulgated by the multi-stakeholder community. The members would have the right to remove board members who fail to uphold the values that currently drive the Internet.

The law firm representing ICANN in all this, Jones Day, has opined that the membership option is not permissible. Indeed, they seem to hold that the present setup is not only the best of all possible worlds and also the only legal option available.

“California law requires that the activities and affairs of ICANN must be conducted and all corporate powers must be exercised by or under the direction of the Board,” the firm said in a memo to ICANN’s Cross-Community Working Group.

But, say other attorneys who have looked at the issue, Jones Day’s analysis simply misses the section of California law that specifically authorizes “members.”

ICANN’s leadership will not, apparently, countenance any limits on its current plenary power. And they have found a law firm willing to defend their position at all costs. Any deal letting ICANN out on its own as a self-governing international body like FIFA or the International Olympic Committee needs to be done right or not at all. Before Congress even considers allowing the Obama administration to move ahead as it apparently intends, it must require that ICANN make the kind of changes to its governing structure that will not only protect its board and staff but will protect us all.

Peter Roff is a senior fellow at Frontiers of Freedom, an organization that works to insure public policy consistent with American constitutional principles remains at the forefront of the political and intellectual debate.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel