Wired on Friday: The Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) seems like one of the cushiest bureaucratic deals in cyberspace. Its board members look almost kingly, sitting atop the net's infrastructure and gaining revenue from it, but rarely intervening or providing concrete advancement.
But ICANN has never been far from controversy, and with a new lawsuit pending, filed by a company that claims ICANN was the willing tool of the American Christian right and the Bush administration, it looks set to spend another few months mired in controversy.
ICANN looks like a king, but it's a king under constant threat. How well it acquits itself now may determine who ends up owning this strategic stronghold of the net.
Created and maintained by the US government to fill one of the few regulatory needs of the internet, ICANN has an apparently simple pair of tasks. It has performed one half of its job - overseeing the process by which a few large, profitable companies hand out domain names - in a relatively hands-off way. The other half involves dividing out the internet numbers that underlie those domains.
To fulfil these tasks, ICANN receives funding from those companies, bringing in about $23 million. Its board members have regular meetings across the world, spending $3 million a year on travel.
But despite the guaranteed income,the momentous net-wide authority, and all those frequent-flier miles, few in the net world aspire to being on the board. It's rather like the King of the Woods in JG Frazer's Golden Bough: potentially all powerful.
But ICANN dare not exercise that power. Pinned between far more powerful forces - the multi-billion dollar commercial domain registrars, the US government, and the UN - all it can do is to convince the world that it does not act as the puppets of any of them.
Perhaps ICANN's most infamous task is creating new "top-level domains" (TLDs).
TLDs are the ".com" and ".org" in internet addresses. One company runs the registry of ".com" addresses, and charges for the creation of new addresses. Another runs ".org".
ICANN is in charge of creating new address endings. This is always controversial, because each time it is creating a new market with a new monopoly provider. When it permitted ".biz", one firm controlled the doling out of all ".biz" addresses, for example. But the revenues are not vast: the majority still live in country TLDs (like ".ie") or the three main alternatives (".net",".org", ".com"). Nonetheless, much bickering revolves around new investitures.
Last month, ICANN was due to sanction the creation of the ".xxx" domain. One can imagine what it was for - it was intended to be an experiment to see if partitioning adult content might be useful to filterers. The idea of an "adults only" corner of the net was opposed by defenders of free speech, primarily because ghettoising one part of the net risked a precedent. At the same time, it was also opposed by a far stronger force: American evangelical Christian groups, who felt that it sanctioned the pornography industry.
When ICANN decided not to go ahead with ".xxx", ICM Registries, the company that stood to gain the monopoly, cried foul. Now, with e-mails obtained with a US Freedom of Information Act, they claim the Bush administration killed the proposal to satisfy evangelical groups. The memos are far from a smoking gun. The Department of Commerce recommends but does not order ICANN to drop ".xxx".
ICANN says it was abandoned because of technical worries. Nonetheless, it's an awkward moment. The department of commerce, which created ICANN, is due to renew its memorandum of understanding with the organisation in September. At the same time, other nations are balking at the US having a say in who controls the naming and numbering of the net.
If ICANN was seen as a puppet of the US government, that would give weight to countries lobbying for an international organisation to take over. Then again, those countries find themselves with even less power than ICANN. ICANN is frozen by fear of doing the wrong thing - which is perhaps a good place for a powerful regulatory body to be.
The international community is stymied because there is nothing it can do to bring it into the international fold. Breaking off from ICANN would balkanise the net - dividing into incompatible networks, each with its own ICANN equivalent.
And the department of commerce? With everyone else frozen, it has no reason to move its position. Nudges by the Christian right aside, the US is still sitting pretty, on the top of the net.
Danny O'Brien is activism co-ordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation
