Goldstein Report

Tag: Larry Strickling

  • DC Trains Laser Focus on ICANN, IANA, and NTIA – ICA Counsel to Speak On U.S Role in Internet Governance by Philip Corwin, Internet Commerce Association

    DC Trains Laser Focus on ICANN, IANA, and NTIA – ICA Counsel to Speak On U.S Role in Internet Governance by Philip Corwin, Internet Commerce Association

    Internet Commerce Association logoThe calm is over, and the storm may be about to begin. Congress is back from recess and not one but two Congressional Committees are about to hone in on the implications of the NTIA’s March 14th announcement of its intention to surrender its IANA functions contract counterparty status with ICANN by September 2015.

    Meantime, an exhausting ICANN meeting has just concluded in Singapore, at which much more was learned about the import of that decision and the complexities of implementing it (more on that in a separate post-jetlag post). Everything ICANN-related, including the Internet governance status of business in general and domainers in particular, is up for grabs and at risk for at least the next eighteen months.

    This is ICANN week in Washington. Besides those two Hill hearings, two major think tanks are also holding ICANN-related programs.

    Here’s the lineup:

    First, on Wednesday, April 2, at 10:30 am ET the Communications and Telecommunications Subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee will consider “Ensuring the Security, Stability, Resilience, and Freedom of the Global Internet” . This is the Subcommittee with direct NTIA oversight, and the hearing may be contentious. The star-studded witness list consists of:

    The Honorable Larry Strickling
    Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information Administration
    National Telecommunications and Information Administration
    U.S. Department of Commerce

    The Honorable David A. Gross
    Partner
    Wiley Rein, LLP

    Mr. Fadi Chehadé
    President and CEO
    Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers

    Mr. Steve DelBianco
    Executive Director
    NetChoice

    Ms. Carolina Rossini
    Project Director, Latin American Resource Center
    Internet Governance and Human Rights Program
    New American Foundation

    The following day, the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet of the House Judiciary Committee will explore the question of “Should the Department of Commerce Relinquish Direct Oversight Over ICANN?” at 10 am Eastern Time. While the witness list is not yet available, the Subcommittee is likely to focus on whether NTIA has the legal power to make this decision absent Congressional authorization — and the potential fallout for Internet free speech and trademark and copyright protection.

    Also on Thursday, at 12 noon the influential Information Technology and Innovation Foundation will hold a program on “Bully or Bodyguard? Assessing the Proper Role of the United States in Internet Governance”. ICA’s Counsel will be one of the presenters. The complete speakers list is:

    Robert D. Atkinson

    President, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation

    Moderator

    Phil Corwin

    Founding Principal, Virtualaw LLC (and ICA Counsel)

    Steve DelBianco

    Executive Director,  NetChoice

    Eli Dourado

    Research Fellow, Mercatus Center

    Finally, at 11 am on Friday, the respected Hudson Institute will host “A Discussion with the Hon. Lawrence Strickling about the future of ICANN”. Coming just after his Hill appearance, this should be a most interesting session.

    Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, all these events will be webcast live so that you can be an eyewitness to history.

    This article by Philip Corwin from the Internet Commerce Association was sourced with permission from:
    www.internetcommerce.org/ICANN_Week_DC

  • US Government Opposes ITU Veto Of ICANN Board Decisions

    The US government is opposed to proposals for the International Telecommunications Union to have a veto over ICANN board decisions, said Larry Strickling at the welcome ceremony for the ICANN Silicon Valley-San Francisco meeting on Monday.”The United States is most assuredly opposed to establishing a governance structure for the Internet that would be managed and controlled by nation states,” said Strickling, the Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information and Administrator, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) at the U.S. Department of Commerce, in one of several suggestions in his address at the ceremony.”Such a structure could lead to the imposition of heavy-handed and economically misguided regulation and the loss of flexibility the current system allows today, all of which would jeopardise the growth and innovation we have enjoyed these past years.”But nonetheless, ICANN needs to do more to engage governments in the multistakeholder process by providing them a meaningful opportunity to participate and be heard inside of ICANN.”Strickling also spoke of the new gTLD programme and said that he was pleased with the progress that has been made between the GAC and ICANN in recent weeks, but that GAC advice should not come at the end of a policy development process.”I am quite pleased with the apparent progress made in the last few weeks as a result of the first really meaningful exchanges between the board and the GAC to understand and evaluate GAC advice on the new global top-level domain program, but as the review team pointed out in its recommendations, this is a two-way street.”The GAC needs to have the discipline in its process to offer consensus advice to the board, but when it does so, the board really needs to listen and engage with the GAC.”A weakness of the current model is that the ICANN bylaws and practices seem to envision that GAC advice often comes at the end of the policy development process. That should not be the case.”In his third suggestion that followed “from the recommendation of the review team” Strickling said “that the board clarify the distinction between issues subject to ICANN’s policy development process and those within the executive functions of the staff and the board.”As ICANN decision-making continues to grow more fractious, the board needs to evaluate the impact that its process of making decisions is having on the development of bottom-up policy within the organisation.”Increasingly, the board finds itself forced to pick winners and losers because the policy development process is not yielding true consensus-based policymaking.”This is not healthy for the organisation.”Strickling believes “there are two steps the board should take.””First, the board needs to insist upon the development of consensus before a matter reaches the board. And when the policy development process delivers a truly consensus process, the board needs to refrain from substituting its own judgment.”Second, when consensus has not been reached, the board needs to push back to ensure that the parties have exhausted all possible efforts to reach consensus before the board imposes its own judgment in a given matter.”If one group — in this case, the ICANN board — attempts to pick winners and losers, the multistakeholder model is undermined. Choosing between competing interests, rather than insisting on consensus, is destructive of the multistakeholder process because it devalues this incentive for everyone to work together.”A full text and audio transcript of the Welcome Ceremony, also including speeches by Vint Cerf, Ira Magaziner, Andrew McLaughlin, Peter Dengate Thrush and Rod Beckstrom is available from svsf40.icann.org/node/22345.