The future of Internet governance

Proceedings of the Annual Meeting-American Society of International Law, Annual, 2007

Do you want to jump in, Michael?

MICHAEL FROOMKIN: ***

I just want to say two things. The first thing is that if Esther had been saying these things when ICANN was founded, we would not have founded ICANN Watch. We would have just quoted everything Esther just said.

The second thing is that I wish I were as confident that ICANN is not dangerous. Nobody has been tortured, nobody has been killed: in the grand scheme of things it is really not that bad. But the budget has grown a lot, and ICANN has gotten rich, and a lot of people have gotten rich in dealing with ICANN.

PROFESSOR WU:

I want to ask all of you whether you think the current system is in fact stable--whether the partnership between ICANN, a California non-profit, and the United States government that exists basically on behalf of the rest of the world--is something that can continue for the foreseeable future, or whether you think its going to run into serious challenges.

MS. DYSON:

I think that your description misses the fact that the ICANN board, whatever its faults, is international. Part of the huge amount of money ICANN spends is in fact spent to be more international, including traveling around the world to hold their meetings. This is a huge expense, and it makes the point that being international is not free, just as being open is not free. ICANN, unfortunately, does a much better job of being international than of being open.

But I think it is stable in a way that an airplane is going through heavy weather. Now, airplanes do not generally crash in heavy weather: they crash when they are landing or taking off. ICANN is very definitely in flight; it is moving up and down a fair amount, but I think it is stable. It is like nuclear deterrence: People are scared to mess with it. There is a wonderful poem by Hillaire Belloc that says, "Hold tightly to the hand of Nurse, for fear of finding something worse."

AMBASSADOR GROSS:

That has always been ICANN's best argument for its existence. I think I see three things which threaten that stability. The first is that there are some new technologies being talked about which could affect the technological assumptions on which ICANN is based. Some countries, particularly China, are looking at setting systems of regulating their internal domain name system (DNS), which, if replicated, could upset what we call now the stability. It might not, but I think that some people want to prioritize traffic.

MS. DYSON:

But it is not actually the technology. China could make the decision now with no new technology to really cut itself off. It would really hurt China even more than it would hurt the rest of the world, but they have enough people that they might just think they should do it.

PROFESSOR FROOMKIN:

The other thing is that there is some talk about redesigning the Internet from scratch to achieve some ends, whether it be to achieve security or prioritizing traffic for movies and so on, which could use the DNS we have. Or this could be an excuse to flip the switch and do something radically different, and there is real money behind these efforts because of the movie delivery aspect. So it is really quite a serious thing, especially in the last six months. There is a lot more hard work going in to try to figure out what that would look like. They are not talking to me at least, and I am not sure that they are talking to themselves about the DNS part of the problem yet. So we do not know what they are going to do, but that is something that could be destabilizing.