Governments Have ‘Extremely Important’ Role in ICANN, Says Hedlund
ICANN’s “challenge” is to ensure that “governments feel like they have an effective voice within” the organization and also that they “aren’t the only ones at the table,” said Vice President Jamie Hedlund. Every four or five years, ICANN is a “target for inter-governmental organizations and is in the cross hairs of some governments who don’t like the multi-stakeholder process,” he said Friday at a forum in Washington organized by the Hogan Lovells law firm.
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Responding a question about efforts by the ITU and some governments to regulate the Internet, Hedlund said the process that led to approval of the new generic top-level domain (gTLD) program showed that governments have a say in ICANN decisionmaking. The discussions between the ICANN board and the Governmental Advisory Committee on the gTLD program resulted in agreement on about 90 percent of the 81 issues raised, he said. “Some governments say that is a failure” because they “didn’t get their say on everything,” he said.
There could some areas where ICANN-related issues, such as fraud and number misuse, could come up at the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) Dec. 3-14 in Dubai, Hedlund said. The conference is to review the International Telecommunication Regulations, which define the general principles for the provision and operation of international telecommunications. At the conference, “some governments within the ITU are looking a little bit to put the genie back in the bottle and reintroduce settlement rates,” he said. Such rates were the old accounting rate system for Internet traffic.
"More protections are built into the new gTLD program than exists for the current registries,” Hedlund told us about concerns raised by some lawmakers on Capitol Hill that the new gTLD system could become a breeding ground for rogue websites. The ICANN community is confident that those protections are “strong and should be effective,” he said. And if there is an issue, he said, there can now be a “bottom-up community effort to change the protections if additional protections are needed or if the existing ones need to be tweaked."
Among things Google is worried about at WCIT is “certain specific proposals” that could harm free flow of information and data across borders such as those relating to fraud, cybersecurity and spam, said Aparna Sridhar, the company’s telecom policy counsel. Not every country has a “tremendous amount of capacity” like the U.S. for the private sector and academia to solve technical problems and look at market-based solutions for issues like access and cybesecurity, she said. The ITU “can be seen as a place to go for answers for some of those questions,” she said. “It is a mistake to say that some of the concerns that are being raised in the forum are not valid.” There needs to be “non-governmental or non inter-governmental” ways to address those concerns, Sridhar said. AT&T Vice President Eric Loeb cautioned against the text that comes out of WCIT being “too specific, too prescriptive” and becoming “irrelevant even before it is ratified.”