NetChoice Challenges Governments to Leave ICANN, Join ITU

Big businesses with large domain-name holdings are glum about ICANN’s plan to greatly increase the number of top- level domains. That mean new expenses for businesses to register names under the new TLDs to protect their brands. NetChoice member eBay owns tens of thousands of domain names to protect its brand, DelBianco said. He was especially upset about a recent comment by Kieren McCarthy, ICANN’s general manager of public participation, that the U.S. government’s qualms about the TLD plan (WID Dec 22 p2) -- reflecting those of U.S. businesses -- were just the complaints of “one stakeholder” amid a chorus of support from other participants. “The business community feels like a corpse at a wake,” DelBianco said. He has often complained at ICANN meetings about what he considers the body’s neglect of business (WID Feb 29 p3).

ICANN escaping Commerce oversight would be like an 18- year-old declaring independence from parental control, DelBianco said. The Justice Department’s harsh criticism of the TLD plan is “just a taste of what ICANN can expect” if Commerce ends its role as a “firewall,” shielding ICANN from pressure from other government agencies to become more regulated, he said.

“Over time I think we've been misled by some of the language we've used” to describe ICANN’s evolution into an independent body, suggesting “movement and separation,” ICANN’s Levins said. The Commerce agreement is really about “delivery and creating permanence,” he said, noting that ICANN has gone through seven memoranda of understanding with Commerce and 13 “report cards” on its health. “It’s been about that since day one. We're not the 18-year-old looking to get out of home. We're already independent.” Levins said domain registration prices have plummeted under ICANN’s watch, from around $70 a year to about $7 now.

Country-code TLD operators are reluctant to sign contracts with ICANN because it’s a California corporation subject to the state’s legal process, said Everton Lucero, head of the science and technology division in Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. That’s a contradiction of the principle from the World Summit on the Information Society at Tunis that countries shouldn’t be involved in each other’s Internet regulations. ICANN can “take the bold step of going international” without becoming a “traditional UN-style intergovernmental organization” like the ITU, Lucero said.

“Why not split the baby?” DelBianco responded. Maybe it’s better for the health of ICANN and independence of each government’s Internet policy for ccTLDs to “roll up under the ITU,” leaving private players under the authority of ICANN -- and the U.S., he said. Each ISP could then just “glue together” the various domain spaces: “Why not live and coexist peacefully?” Levins said DelBianco was asking too much. “We're never going to perfect this model,” Levins said. “That’s not the point … It’s always going to be messy,” because the Commerce agreement itself is only general principles that must be constantly updated to make the Internet more secure and transparent. Lucero said he was skeptical the “glue” solution would work. Noting DelBianco’s earlier support for ICANN as a “private sector-led” authority, Lucero said NetChoice itself was marginalizing the legitimate role of governments, civil society and the academic world in governing the Internet.

ICANN will remain a “friend” to the U.S. even if they aren’t “holding hands,” Levins said. The body is well aware that the TLD expansion plan -- whose first deadline for applications comes two months before the agreement’s expiration -- could be used against the body’s effort for independence if ICANN botches the evaluation process, he said. Levins also waved off McCarthy’s “one stakeholder” comment, made on a blog for ICANN participants, as simply “conversation.” DelBianco defended Levins on the body’s consideration of criticism. “They're very sensitive about being seen doing TLDs right.” -- Greg Piper

State of the Net Conference Notes…

Members of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force sparred over Aristotle International’s rebuttal to the task force’s report (WID Jan 14 p4), during a panel at the State of the Net conference. Blair Richardson of Aristotle said one of his big disappointments was that people reading coverage of the report would assume that the task force did its own research on sexual predation online, when actually it merely collected previous studies. Nor did the task force advance the research by asking MySpace to hold on to information on the activities of sex offenders it discovered and kicked off the site, he said. “The task force did not call on MySpace to stop destroying that data and instead make it available for study,” he said. Larry Magid of ConnectSafely asked from the audience why Aristotle insists on beating up on MySpace when the company has taken action. Richardson said it’s unlikely that sex offenders kicked off the site, because they registered under their real names, have simply given up. More likely they've re-registered under false names, he said. John Morris of the Center for Democracy & Technology said there may well be sex offenders on social networking sites, but the research hasn’t shown that has led to actual harm. Donna Rice-Hughes said people should be careful when noting that most minors who meet adults for sex know they're meeting adults. “We don’t know at what point along the grooming process the predator does disclose their age,” she said from the audience. Hughes is president of Enough is Enough. Enough is Enough and ConnectSafely were task force members. -- LC

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Virginia will soon offer the first “open source” course work for supplementing outdated textbooks and make it freely available on the Internet, said state Secretary of Technology Aneesh Chopra. Advanced physics subjects like nanotechnology are absent from state physics textbooks, so the state worked with nonprofit CK12 to “rip, mix and burn educational content,” paralleling the way iTunes has fueled purchases of singles, he said. The state received about a dozen responses to a September inquiry to take part without pay in the creation of the “Virginia Physics Flexbook,” Chopra said. Submissions went through several layers of scientific review, Chopra said, but the writers’ physics credentials weren’t strictly screened: A high school student’s submission was accepted. The flexbook will be released Feb. 23 with 10 chapters that supplement state physics texts “before we'll have even started the new standards work in physics,” he said. “The currency in this world is chapters, not books.” The state overcame budget hurdles to set up an advanced technology infrastructure with Northrup Grumman, which is advancing the cost of creating new data centers and buying PCs with a long-term promise of revenue from system maintenance, Chopra said. But federal cost-allocation principles make it difficult for Virginia to share server capacity across multiple agencies, leaving the state with 75 percent underutilization of capacity, from using servers isolated by project, he said. On making public data easier to find, Chopra said Virginia government Web sites have seen 10 to 20 percent growth since agencies started in May 2007 adopting the Sitemaps protocol, which makes it easier for search engines to crawl Web pages. Growth is over 40 percent for agencies actually using Sitemaps, he added. The problem is “it really raises the ire of the privacy folks” to have so much personally identifiable information in public data suddenly be easy to find, which has led to state discussion on limiting the collection and use of such information. Other tech projects in Virginia include the state-employee health plan’s use as a “test bed” for voluntarily tracking visits to health facilities to seek correlations and predict health problems, the way retailers use purchaser data to predict purchases, Chopra said. The contract for the test bed will be announced in a few weeks, he said. Next month Virginia launches its Plugged In project to train adults in GED education for jobs in technology. Thirty students will start a six-month curriculum that ends with a guaranteed entry-level job interview with Northrup Grumman and a “high probability” they'll be hired, Chopra said. Virginia wants to “convert the uncredentialed onto a career path for the future.” Gov. Tim Kaine, a Democrat, will propose legislation this week to formalize an information-technology standards panel composed of experts to determine what standards the state will impose on procurement contracts, Chopra said. It will include a “feedback loop” to the federal government for the state to propose federal standards. Kaine also will propose an “angel investor tax credit” for commercializing university inventions, a first for a state, Chopra said.