Accountability Issues to Headline ICANN 51
Whether and how ICANN upper management responds to widespread community concerns about the nonprofit’s proposed accountability process will likely determine the outcome of the ICANN 51 conference in Los Angeles this week, said stakeholders in interviews last week. “Expect a lot of discussion on ICANN’s accountability enhancement process,” said NetChoice Executive Director Steve DelBianco. The conference was to begin Monday and end Thursday (http://bit.ly/1uEgdIC).
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The “depth” of the mistrust between ICANN’s leadership and the larger community varies between the “passionate” supporters of the multistakeholder process and commercial stakeholders who want “stability,” said CEO Nao Matsukata of FairWinds Partners, a domain consultancy.
ICANN opened a 21-day public comment period on the accountability process last month (CD Sept 9 p8), after major constituencies and stakeholder groups sent a letter (http://bit.ly/1vtyqwu) to CEO Fadi Chehade and board Chairman Steve Crocker asking for clarification on the accountability process (CD Aug 27 p9). Chehade and Crocker responded to the stakeholder letter and said the “emerging theme” of the accountability questions seemed to be “building trust” between ICANN leadership and its community (CD Sept 30 p4; Sept 29 p6).
The underlying concern is whether ICANN is developing an accountability process without a genuine check on its board and upper management. A few of the issues cited in the accountability comments include the influence the Public Experts Group -- and the seven advisers PEG will select -- will have upon the overall process; ICANN’s proposed community working group model versus the traditional cross-community working model; and the scope of the process. Some ICANN stakeholders believe the accountability process should encompass more than the issues related to the transition of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).
The ICANN community “clearly wants a lot more control over the accountability process,” said Phil Corwin, founding principal of e-commerce and intellectual property law consultancy Virtualaw. Corwin said he would be “dismayed” if he leaves ICANN 51 without more “clarity” on how the organization’s top executives intend to respond to the accountability concerns and hoped ICANN wouldn’t make accountability announcements after the conference. Last week, ICANN asked the IANA Cross Community Working Group to develop a proposal -- to be made available for public comment in four weeks -- on IANA stewardship, said Corwin, who’s a member of the group. “ICANN is driving this forward very fast,” which could lead to the accountability process lagging behind the IANA transition, he said.
DelBianco and Matsukata said they expect ICANN 51 to address the coming second-round release of new generic top-level domains. DelBianco will be looking to see if the regulations for second-round gTLDs will promote “consumer trust, choice and competition.” The outcome of the reviews for those gTLDs should be reflected in ICANN’s new gTLD guidebook and policy before the second-round begins, said DelBianco. Matsukata said there’s a lot of “momentum” and a “pretty consistent level of noise” for the new round, but doesn’t expect it to happen until 2016.