[npoc-voice] April 2 2014 WEBCAST of United States House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee on ICANN/IANA Transition

[Sam Lanfranco <lanfran@xxxxxxxx>]

Dear NPOC members:

April 2, 2014 [by Sam Lanfranco]: The United States Congress’ House of 
Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee has just finished a three 
hour session on the NTIA announcement to (a) transition oversight of 
IANA and (b) charging ICANN with developing the proposal for that 
transition process.
The videos of the session should soon be posted to: 
http://energycommerce.house.gov/studio/videos and to 
http://www.youtube.com/user/energyandcommerce
Fadi Chehadé testified at the session and did an excellent presentation 
of ICANN and ICANN’s role in this process. There were partisan comments 
and questions and the issues that, in my view, boiled to the top were 
the following:
First, there are two multistakeholder issues here. One is how the 
multistakeholder approach will work in the open and transparent 
development of a transition of IANA oversight. The world will be 
watching both the process and how national governments (the US and 
others) interact with and respond to that process. Second, what sort of 
multistakeholder based proposal will be the product of this process?  
Both are equally important with the multistakeholder model as a key 
foundation element.
Second, there is no pressure of deadlines. The fall of 2015 is a 
milestone, not a cliff. It will be a good time to assess progress, but 
the process has more time (two 2-year extensions) to have a good 
multistakeholder process produce a good multistakeholder governance result.
Third, it is clear that NTIA (aka the US Government) will not sign off 
on a proposal that compromises the four principles stated in the NTIA 
announcement.
Fourth: There was, and will continue to be, concern that whatever the 
proposed governance and oversight structures would be for the IANA 
functions, there is the worry that at some time governments hostile to 
an open Internet would be in a position to capture control of 
significant aspects of the domain name system. One cannot predict the 
future, so that issue has to be addressed with adequate care. The 
Committee talked about “stress testing” any proposal. In my view any 
proposal should embody elements of the “precautionary principle” with 
regard to unexpected challenges to Internet openness and 
multistakeholder governance.
Fifth: Some members of the committee noted the breadth and depth of 
global stakeholder use of the Internet and urged efforts to broader the 
engagement of stakeholders, both in this process and in the wider 
governance and operational issues of the Internet.
The videos of the session should soon be posted to: 
http://energycommerce.house.gov/studio/videos and to 
http://www.youtube.com/user/energyandcommerce