ICANN chief sees potential problems as US prepares to relinquish web oversight
05 Aug 2015
While there is still a year to go for a historic transition that would affect the digital landscape, the head of the organisation that regulates web addresses has warned there was much that needed to be done to keep the internet intact, regardless of whether the US relinquished its oversight as expected.
''New mechanisms, new methods of governance, need to be created, and we are yet to figure them out,'' Fadi Chehade, CEO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), told The Washington Times in a recent interview.
''If we don't figure this out, in my opinion, in the next two to three years, we are going to have some major problems.''
ICANN's role with respect to governance of the internet was set for a change that had been anticipated since the organisation came in existence 17 years ago.
The organisation was set up in response to calls from policymakers who sought to establish some degree of structure for the expanding online sphere.
Outside of the group's scope, however, Chehade said, were several crucial issues - human rights, privacy and access to the internet, among many others which he feared could potentially create problems if not adequately resolved within the next few years.
Meanwhile, journalist Kieren McCarthy said in The Register, the plan the internet community had produced to pull the US government out of its role at the top of the internet's hierarchy was a hodge-podge of ideas and compromises that failed to address a key aspect of US' role.
Also the plan substituted a complex set of unworkable process steps in place of the US Department of Commerce's simple oversight of the internet and was reliant on an unfinished process for improving accountability at the organisation that would assume de facto control, ICANN.
He said that most of the problems in the plan arose from political rather than technical issues, which meant its main aspects would likely remain even after a public comment period.
Particularly, the decision to award ICANN control of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), responsible for the global coordination of the DNS Root, IP addressing, and other Internet protocol resources through a wholly-controlled affiliate remained controversial, and there was reason to believe that the ''process was distorted in order to arrive at a pre-decided outcome.''
