REFORM PLAN FALLS FAR SHORT

JUNE 28, 2002 – Today, as expected, the Directors of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) approved its "Blueprint for Reform" without amendment in Bucharest, Romania. While an improvement on earlier drafts, the current blueprint fails in a number of key areas and is unlikely to promote broader trust in ICANN.

The reform plan approved today would firmly entrench the policy-making authority of ICANN’s board over critical Internet naming and numbering functions of great importance to Internet users. In doing so it risks creating a global regulator with increased powers, reduced public accountability, and a sharply diminished voice for the public’s interests.

The blueprint makes modest improvements over previous proposals that would have vested massive control over the organization in the hands of its board, created an inappropriate role for government control, and eliminated almost all user participation. Yet the current plan remains critically flawed in crucial areas:

* No Meaningful Checks on ICANN’s Power.

There are no meaningful institutional limitations, checks, or balances on future expansion of ICANN’s powers by the board. Vague wording in ICANN’s mission documents leave the potential for almost unbounded future expansions of power. A lack of implementation detail leaves a great deal of ambiguity about even ICANN’s current activities.

* Diminished Accountability.

The reform plan contains no mechanism for meaningful outside review of ICANN’s actions, a baseline requirement of ICANN’s original agreements. The Blueprint abandons the Independent Review Panel (relying instead on a weak internal ombudsman and non-binding arbitration proceeding), vests more power in the hands of its board and less in its bottom-up consensus processes, and adopts "streamlined processes" that could diminish transparency even further, thus worsening an increasingly serious problem with how ICANN functions.

* A Pale Shadow of Promised User Representation.

The original promise that half of ICANN’s board would be selected by the user community has been abandoned, and users will have no direct representation on the ICANN board. Instead, a powerful nineteen-member Nominating Committee may include up to six non-commercial or "public interest" members to select a part of the board – but those members will be picked by that same board, and operate through processes that remain poorly defined and lack transparency.

CDT and Common Cause believe improvements in these critical areas should be a condition of the global Internet community's trust in ICANN and should specifically be part of the U.S. government’s next MoU agreement with ICANN. We look forward to working with the international community, as well as the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Congress, to make ICANN a better steward of the public trust which it has been given.

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