ICANN has “every expectation” it will be able to complete the ongoing Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) transition process before its contract with NTIA expires Sept. 30, 2016, ICANN CEO Fadi Chehadé said Thursday during a conference call. NTIA said Monday that it intends to extend its contract with ICANN to administer the IANA functions a full year beyond the existing Sept. 30, 2015, contract deadline to allow additional time to plan and execute the transition. That extension provides some additional breathing room for the IANA transition but doesn’t leave much time for additional delays, stakeholders told us (see 1508190064). Any further extension beyond Sept. 30, 2016, would be problematic because it would cause uncertainty among ICANN stakeholders about the IANA transition’s future, given that the extended deadline will occur so close to the 2016 presidential election, Chehadé said. The election itself shouldn’t “have a direct impact” on the IANA transition because of the “almost complete consensus” among members of Congress about the transition’s value, he said.
Jimm Phillips
Jimm Phillips, Associate Editor, covers telecommunications policymaking in Congress for Communications Daily. He joined Warren Communications News in 2012 after stints at the Washington Post and the American Independent News Network. Phillips is a Maryland native who graduated from American University. You can follow him on Twitter: @JLPhillipsDC
NTIA’s extension of its contract with ICANN to administer the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) functions until Sept. 30, 2016, (see 1508180068) gives ICANN stakeholders needed extra time to finalize plans for the transition, experts said in interviews. But they said the one-year extension still doesn’t leave much of a cushion for dealing with unforeseen issues. The IANA contract extension is unlikely to affect Congress’ desire to seek additional oversight of the transition process after the August recess, stakeholders said.
NTIA extended its existing contract with ICANN to administer the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) until Sept. 30, 2016, as expected (see 1506220053). The existing IANA contract was set to expire at the end of next month. But NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling told the House Communications Subcommittee last month (see 1507080044) that he planned to seek an extension of the contract after ICANN stakeholders indicated that the ongoing IANA transition process would last until as late as September 2016. “After factoring in time for public comment, U.S. Government evaluation and implementation of the proposals, the community estimated it could take until at least September 2016 to complete this process,” Strickling said Monday in a blog post.
FTC Commissioner Joshua Wright said he plans to resign effective Aug. 24. He said Monday he plans to return to his former job as a George Mason University School of Law professor and director of the school’s Global Antitrust Institute at the Law and Economics Center. That will leave the commission with a 3-1 Democratic majority and Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen its sole Republican. Although it won’t affect the commission’s partisan balance, industry stakeholders told us that the loss of one of the FTC’s two Republican voices will likely prompt Capitol Hill to pressure President Barack Obama to quickly name a replacement.
Recent cyberattacks and data breaches against federal agencies and the private sector have prompted the communications sector and other industries to significantly increase their focus on cybersecurity as a factor when considering buying another company, industry lawyers and consultants said in interviews. The push to give the private sector the leading role in driving sectorwide improvements in cybersecurity, as evidenced in the development of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Cybersecurity Framework, means federal agencies are not closely monitoring cybersecurity as a main factor in deal reviews, stakeholders said.
The FTC formalized in a policy statement Thursday principles for exercising its standalone FTC Act Section 5 authority to take enforcement actions against companies for “unfair” competition practices that fall outside the Clayton Act and Sherman Act. The policy statement largely hewed to existing commission practices and, as expected, doesn’t delve into specific issues (see 1508120065). The FTC didn't adopt the statement unanimously, as Chairwoman Edith Ramirez had been said to have sought.
U.S. companies will likely need to comply with the EU “right to be forgotten” even if it’s never enshrined in U.S. law, privacy lawyers said Wednesday during a Bloomberg BNA webinar. The EU right to be forgotten policy, enshrined in a 2014 European Court of Justice ruling (see 1412160022) and in the European Parliament and Commission’s proposed general approach on data protection reform (see 1506150001), has long been a source of concern for U.S. companies already at “loggerheads” with the EU on other issues, said Kramer Levin Internet and privacy lawyer Kevin Moss. Many of those companies already operate in EU member nations, where governments would argue that U.S. companies are subject to their data protection laws, Dentons lawyer Andy Roth said. “Europe and Silicon Valley are on a collision course.” U.S. companies may face similar difficulties elsewhere on the right to be forgotten, because “a lot of the world is moving closer to the EU model,” Roth said. It would be difficult to codify an EU-style right to be forgotten into U.S. law, given differing interpretations of the right to privacy, Cohen & Gresser lawyer Karen Bromberg said. U.S. courts recognize a right to privacy within the Fourth Amendment and in other case law, but arguments citing the First Amendment tend to “trump” those claims, she said. The publication of a person’s criminal history, one of several issues often cited in arguments favoring the right to be forgotten, is explicitly protected under the First Amendment, Bromberg said.
FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez is likely to reveal details Thursday of a commission policy statement that could further delineate its authority under FTC Act Section 5 to police “unfair” competition among U.S. companies, industry lawyers told us. Ramirez is to speak at George Washington University Law School at noon about competition enforcement. The commission didn’t comment on whether the speech would address the widely anticipated Section 5 policy. Recent FTC uses of Section 5 enforcement in the tech sector include investigations of Google’s business practices on search engine bias, standard-essential patents and prohibiting advertisers from advertising on multiple search engines. Google later settled (see report in the Jan. 4, 2013, issue).
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled against the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System. The three-judge panel ruled against noncommercial broadcaster association IBS’s appeal of the Copyright Royalty Board’s 2014 redetermination in its proceeding to set webcasting royalty rates for the 2011-15. The D.C. Circuit previously ruled against CRB in IBS’s earlier appeal of the board’s 2011 determination on webcasting rates. The court had said CRB judges in charge of the rate-setting were appointed in violation of the Appointments Clause and that CRB’s minimum annual $500 fee for commercial and noncommercial webcasters shouldn’t apply to small webcasters.
Google’s planned restructuring of its corporate apparatus and placing the company under the auspices of the Alphabet holding company (see 1508100066) also drew attention to the URL of the website that Alphabet CEO Larry Page chose to announce the restructuring -- abc.xyz. The .xyz domain, administered by the XYZ.com registry, topped the new gTLD market at our deadline Tuesday with a 16.5 percent share, nTLDstats said. The registry has sold more than 1.14 million .xyz domain names.