ICANN’s Relevance Not Threatened by Apps, Social Media, Ex-CEO Says
ICANN’s expensive and controversial generic top-level domain (gTLD) expansion program is not for naught as mobile applications and social media become more popular alternatives for developers and consumers, the group’s recently-departed CEO said. Rod Beckstrom, who joined ICANN from the Department of Homeland Security after a public spat with the National Security Agency (NSA), said in an interview for C-SPAN’s The Communicators that the “netizens” of the world would rise to challenge future Internet regulation in the image of the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). His temporary successor, Chief Operating Officer Akram Atallah, will be replaced by Fadi Chehade this fall.
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Beckstrom touted ICANN’s increased global participation under his tenure, in the videotaped interview that airs on the cable channel this weekend. Asia represents “just over half” of Internet users and there’s “good penetration” in Latin America and Africa, Beckstrom said: Membership on ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee is at 110 nations and the governing body added 30 members to its Country Code Names Supporting Organisation during his tenure. What had been a single non-English fluent member of ICANN’s executive management team is now 17 people, he said.
ITU members are facing an “incredible tsunami force and change” from the Internet, so it’s not surprisingly there are calls for more international oversight of the Internet, Beckstrom said: The “SOPA debacle” in the U.S. should put governments on notice. “The great news is that the netizens of this country … rose up with the leadership that [Wikipedia founder] Jimmy Wales and others demonstrated” by blacking out their websites in protest, Beckstom said: It’s a “new reality that governments have to deal with,” that when they create new regulations harming Internet freedom, there will be “very strong public responses.” The solution to a perceived problem on the Internet is usually worse than the “underlying disease,” he said.
Speaking from the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, where he keynoted in 2008 as head of DHS’s National Cyber Security Center, Beckstrom said a big topic of discussion was security problems in mobile apps. Though some say domain names are on the decline because of apps, “there’s no indication of that so far,” with more creativity and growth coming out of the domain name industry, he said. “No one can predict the future in technology … so we're all students of this magnificent process that continues to unfold.” Similarly the presumed decline of domain names due to social media “just hasn’t happened,” with domain registrations growing globally, Beckstrom said. People predicted the fall of the industry when Facebook first became popular too, he said.
Beckstrom said he'd attend the hacker-heavy Defcon event in the next few days in Las Vegas. He downplayed his 2009 public spat with NSA Director Keith Alexander, a Black Hat keynote speaker this week, over the NSA’s increased involvement in cybersecurity. “I expressed certain views when I resigned about the NSA” and “I still believe there needs to be a separation” between civilian and military authority in cyberspace, but Beckstrom said he left government to be with his family.
"The reality is anything attached to a network these days is vulnerable,” and it’s “much easier to write policy than implement successful programs,” Beckstrom said. It’s better to work within existing legal structures than create new laws that may harm Internet openness, he said. He’s glad to hear that sponsors of the Senate Cybersecurity Act (S-3414) made some concessions to critics of overregulation, but not all digital “communities” have told him they're “content” with the revised bill, Beckstrom said. The U.S. should focus on “collaboration centers” where technology companies and agencies work together voluntarily, he said: “Don’t try to pull the information into the government, because that usually becomes a one-way sucking sound” and information doesn’t get shared the other way with industry.
Beckstrom defended the gTLD expansion, which costs $185,000 per application, as “costed out on a breakeven basis” that covers legal, criminal background, financial and technical checks, plus review panels and consideration of objections. If costs end up being lower than the application fee, the “ICANN community” will decide what to do with the surplus, which isn’t designated automatically for ICANN, he said. It’s in the middle of considering about 1,900 applications, he said. Anyone can object or comment on applications at ICANN.org, though only parties with “standing” like trademark owners can make formal objections, he said.
Cybersquatting is a “very tricky thing to define,” Beckstrom said. Intellectual property rightsholders have “preference” in the gTLD expansion, and there will be “some level” of defensive registrations, but most of those parties will “link back” to their existing website, so they're getting “economic benefit” from the program, he said. Because of the “fragmented” nature of the trademark system globally, there’s bound to be conflict with the unified DNS system, he said, predicting “some really interesting policy challenges” for “decades.” The “radical transparency” of the Internet similarly clashes with the “artificial construct” of privacy, and “there’s not a simple solution that can solve that equation” between IP rights, privacy and security, he said.