ICANN vs. VeriSign: What's Not to Hate?

By Shannon Cochran

March 15, 2004

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Take a moment and try to think of a few governments throughout history that have been truly excellent, that have epitomized the best in leadership. It's a difficult exercise; the word "government" doesn't often bring a smile to our faces. But give it a try. Maybe an argument could be made for Churchill's Britain or Lincoln's America. Maybe you think of Charlemagne.

But I'll bet you ICANN isn't anywhere on your list.

Most of us acknowledge the need for some degree of centralized organization in human affairs. The current state of Internet government, though, is enough to turn a law-abiding citizen into a bomb-throwing bolshevik.

ICANN has, of course, been under attack ever since it was first conceived. The Department of Commerce's 1998 decision to invest a private, nonprofit California corporation with regulatory control over the DNS hierarchy "violates basic norms of due process and public policy designed to ensure that federal power is exercised responsibly," wrote A. Michael Froomkin, Professor at the University of Miami School of Law and co-founder of the ICANNWatch group, in his essay "Wrong Turn in Cyberspace."

Consumer advocates accused ICANN of secrecy and unaccountability, a charge that intensified when ICANN jettisoned five of its publicly-elected board members. Other critics lambasted ICANN's byzantine bureaucratic structure and charged it with overspending. Even then-president M. Stuart Lynn acknowledged in 2002 that "A candid assessment of ICANN's performance to date would have to conclude that it has fallen short of hopes and expectations."

ICANN isn't all bad. With leaders like Vint Cerf, it can't be accused of technical incompetence. And it did succeed in ending VeriSign's monopoly over domain name registrations. But as much as ICANN likes to insist that its function is purely technical, it's obvious that the corporation is in fact creating Internet policy.

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