Unlikely U.S. Will Regain Control of Internet Address Book, Georgia Tech Public Policy Expert Says

Posted January 25, 2018

A Georgia Institute of Technology expert on internet governance says it’s unlikely that ICANN, the California non-profit that manages the Internet’s address book, is likely to end up back under U.S. government control — despite a news report stating that a U.S. Commerce Department nominee indicated he would consider doing just that.

Politico reported Jan. 23 that David Redl, the head of the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, promised senators before he was confirmed that he would look into ways the government could restore his agency’s traditional oversight role over ICANN — the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The NTIA relinquished control of ICANN  in 2016.

Trying to undo that change would be legally difficult, not to mention potentially disastrous, said Milton Mueller, a Georgia Tech professor and co-founder of the Internet Governance Project, a policy analysis center for global Internet governance.

“It would totally discredit ICANN and could lead other countries to abandon the organization’s stewardship of the Internet’s domain name system,” he said.

The IGP is a unit of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Art’s School of Public Policy.

ICANN Performs Critical Role

ICANN maintains the domain name system, the list of website names (such as www.iac.gatech.edu), accredits registrars that issue new domain names, assigns “top level domains,” such as “.com” or “.net,” to private registries, and performs other crucial behind-the-scenes work to keep the global network humming.

Since its transition away from U.S. oversight, ICANN has followed a fully community-driven policymaking process in which internet users, businesses, non-governmental organizations, governments, researchers and academic and technical interests around the world are represented.

 “The point of a governance model based on non-state actors is that it liberates the domain name system, which needs to be globally administered and globally compatible, from the fragmented territorial jurisdiction of states,” Mueller said.

Governments Need Not Apply, Mueller Says

Critics of the transition have argued that without U.S. oversight and protection of its activities, ICANN would be vulnerable to influence from governments and other actors seeking to make it a less free and open system.

Mueller, whose center was a major proponent of the ICANN transition, argues that the opposite is true.

“The more you know about Internet governance the more you understand that having a government — any government — in control of the global domain name system is a bad idea,” he said.

“For one country to assert unilateral control over such a resource is like the U.S. declaring that it controls all of outer space or all of the oceans. Such a claim would simply provoke other countries into making their own claims to power and it would push internet governance into a government-dominated United Nations-based system of governance.”

Read more about Dr. Mueller's perspective on this here.