WASHINGTON -- The Internet's governing body has suddenly been thrown into more turmoil than in any previous time of its four-year history.
The imbroglio began late Sunday, when the president of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers candidly admitted that the group's experiment in global online democracy had been a loser of an idea. His language was blunt: "Flawed from the beginning ... noble but deeply unrealistic ... fatally flawed."
But ICANN's M. Stuart Lynn didn't stop there. Lynn published a 17,000-word treatise that called for radical reforms -- including boosting the involvement of national governments, abolishing elections, and ceding more power to ICANN than ever before.
The reaction was nothing if not impassioned. Karl Auerbach, an ICANN board member and sometime critic, immediately characterized Lynn's plan as wrong-headed: "This is closing the door, clamming up and being more non-responsive to the public."
"So far there's nothing in (the proposal) to make us comfortable that ICANN's activities are going to be properly constrained and properly representative of the public's interest," said Alan Davidson, staff counsel with the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, D.C.
Many observers believe that ICANN, which sprang into existence in November 1998 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has strayed too far from its original mission of preserving the stability of the Internet's domain name system and needs to be reformed. Until now, the suggestions typically included more participation by the Internet public, greater transparency in board deliberations, and a revamped process through which new top-level domains are added.
But Lynn's proposal has become an instant catalyst for criticism because it zigs in the opposite direction that reformers want: It all but eliminates public participation, increases control by governments and corporations, and promises to turn ICANN into a kind of international government-run bureaucracy like the Council of Europe or the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Lynn's complaints about the current structure of ICANN can be summarized succinctly: Lack of control and lack of cash. He bemoans ICANN's lack of influence over the 240-odd country code operators, such as dot-uk, dot-fr and dot-tv. He claims the current ad hoc way that volunteers run the root server system is too informal. He suggests an annual budget of about $43 million, raised from country-code operators and governments.
In much the same way that politicians bemoan lack of voter interest, Lynn frets about lack of interest from corporations, Internet providers and backbone providers: "Broad participation by those commercial entities that most depend on a reliable Internet has not been forthcoming."
ICANN started as a grand experiment in international relations: It was to become the first representative global democracy. Its backers believed the Internet could become a kind of self-governing republic, with Net-enabled elections and representation on the board of directors from every corner of the globe. For historic reasons, the U.S. government operated many of the Internet's housekeeping functions, and it gradually fobbed some off to ICANN.
But the transition is not complete and may never be. U.S. congressional investigators reported in July 2000 that it may not be legal for the Commerce Department to turn over control of the "root server," the master list of commonly accepted top-level domains. During a conference call on Monday afternoon, Lynn said that if the U.S. government "were to violently disagree with (what) we're doing, they're not going to transfer control of the root."
That's why Lynn says "national governments are perhaps the most irreplaceable supporters of ICANN" and he envisions them appointing five of a future 15 ICANN directors.
Commerce Department spokesman Clyde Ensslin said it was too early to comment on the proposal's merits but that the department supports any efforts by ICANN to evaluate how it could better fulfill its mission.
The proposal increases the importance of a March 10-14 ICANN meeting in Accra, Ghana, where board members can begin considering the overhaul, though they aren't likely to make any final decisions. Since it would dramatically rewrite the group's by-laws, it would require the board's approval.
In the last few days, ICANN's staff has quietly added Lynn's proposal to the Accra agenda. There already had been an agenda item called "ICANN Restructuring."
Previously, that was linked to a report from a November 2001 meeting. Now it points to Lynn's paper.
Lynn's proposal comes after a closed-door board meeting this weekend at the posh Willard Inter-Continental Hotel in Washington, D.C., two blocks from the White House. ICANN claims the public could be barred from the proceedings because the event was a retreat and not a formal meeting.
The plan does not specify how governments would nominate board members, other than to say one member would come from each of five geographic regions. Government nominees would comprise one third of the 15-member board. Another third would come through a committee process, with the rest consisting of ICANN's president and appointments by four policy and technical groups.
Currently, five of the 19 board members are elected by the general Internet community, though ICANN already has suspended future elections pending a review. A study committee last year recommended keeping elections, but with narrower definitions of who could vote.
Since its creation in 1998, ICANN has promoted competition among domain name registrars, allowing companies such as Register.com to compete, in part, against Verisign's Network Solutions unit. It also imposed mandatory arbitration of trademark disputes -- a process called the "Uniform Domain-Name Dispute-Resolution Policy" and approved a handful of new top-level domains.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
