By David McGuire
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer Thursday, August 1, 2002; 5:44 PM
The operators of the world's five largest Internet domains today asked
the U.S. Commerce Department to scale back the powers of the body that
manages the Internet's global addressing system.
The three companies that manage dot-com, dot-net, dot-org, dot-de and dot-uk told Commerce Department Undersecretary Nancy Victory that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) should be reined in.
ICANN leaders have "very, very creatively interpreted their authority
to get into areas they were never authorized to get into," Roger Cochetti, senior vice president of policy at VeriSign Inc., said today. "What [Commerce officials] need to do is ensure that ICANN as their agent conducts only activities for which it is authorized and no
others."
The world's largest Internet addressing company, VeriSign operates dot-com, dot-net and dot-org -- the first, third and fifth largest
domains.
DENIC, which operates dot-de, and Nominet UK, which operates dot-uk, collaborated on the statement with VeriSign and several other, smaller registry operators.
In a letter to Victory dated today, the trade association representing the European registry operators said that they had worked closely with
VeriSign "in reaching a common view of a lightweight ICANN."
Although ICANN has come under fire from public interest groups and lawmakers who have questioned the openness and public accountability of the group, today's statement represents one of the most vocal
critiques of the organization from the industry it manages.
Germany's sovereign Internet addressing code, dot-de, has more than 5.5 million registrations and is the second largest Internet domain
behind the mammoth dot-com. The United Kingdom's dot-uk is the fourth largest Internet domain with more than 3.5 million registrations.
ICANN President Stuart Lynn said he's not surprised that the groups want to free themselves from the regulatory fetters that bind them.
"A registry by definition has a monopoly, so they all have a common interest in preserving individual monopolistic practices, so they
don't want to be accountable to anybody," Lynn said.
Registry operators like VeriSign, DENIC and Nominet wield substantial power over valuable, limited resources, Lynn said. ICANN maintains the only real check on those powers, he added.
ICANN oversees the Domain Name System (DNS) under a series of agreements with the Commerce Department. In that capacity, ICANN
determines the wholesale prices for many domain names, decides what new domains can be added to the system and maintains contractual
agreements with many addressing companies.
Cochetti said the coalition of addressing companies want ICANN to stop "regulating" the prices and services domain-name wholesalers (or
registries) can offer. The group would also like to see ICANN get out of the business of deciding who may manage country-code top-level
domains like dot-de and dot-uk.
ICANN's agreements with the U.S. government never cleared ICANN to perform those duties, Cochetti said.
Lynn countered that those duties fall squarely under those agreements.
"The record doesn't even begin to support that," Lynn said of the assertion that ICANN has gradually taken on more power than it was
authorized to wield. "This is rhetoric by someone who runs the biggest registry -- by a factor of four -- in the world," Lynn said of
VeriSign.
VeriSign runs dot-com, dot-net and dot-org under agreements with ICANN that prevent VeriSign from raising the wholesale price of the
addresses it sells ($6), or substantially changing the way it runs the domains.
Lynn contended that VeriSign happily entered the agreements under which their prices were capped.
"If they put their efforts into improving their customer service rather than into complaining about the agreements they voluntarily entered into and are now trying to wriggle out of, they'd probably be farther
ahead," Lynn said, citing VeriSign's shrinking industry market share.
Lynn accused VeriSign and the European registries that signed the letter of attempting to exploit an internal ICANN reform process to
gain greater economic advantage.
In September, ICANN's agreements with the U.S. government are up for renewal. The Commerce Department says it is closely following ICANN's
internal reform effort.
Responding to concerns about openness, accountability and public participation, ICANN is attempting to reform its governance
structure.
Cochetti said that concerns about that reform proposal were one of the
main triggers for today's joint statement.
"We collectively are deeply disturbed that the debate over ICANN reform has not focused on the critical issue, which is ICANN's
function," Cochetti said.
Although ICANN has proposed reconfiguring its management structure, it
has not proposed any real reforms of its duties, Cochetti said.
"We welcome this statement," said Clyde Ensslin, a spokesman for the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration. "The issues addressed in the letter are very significant," he said.
In a related development late today, members of the U.S. Senate Republican High Tech Task Force sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Donald Evans urging him to review the department's agreements with ICANN.
"We are particularly concerned that ICANN is becoming an unaccountable regulatory body that controls prices, services and business practices of domain name companies," the lawmakers wrote. "Price controls are not part of ICANN's core functions nor are they necessary to keep the
Internet a global marketplace."
Sources in Evans' office were not immediately available for comment on the task force's letter.
