Obama to make call on ICANN

US president-elect Barack Obama has already pitched himself as tech-savvy about broadband speed and the like, so he looks well-placed to deal with possibly the biggest technology challenges of his first year in office: the future of ICANN, the domain names organisation that helps run the internet.

US president-elect Barack Obama must release ICANN from the clutches of the US Government

Next September the group's long-running agreement with the US Commerce Department is up for review. The arrangement is many years past its use-by date and this time ICANN (the International Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers) wants out.

The context of the proposed split is ICANN's long-running project to throw open internet domain names to non-Western scripts such as Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and Hindi.

This is known as the expansion of generic top-level domain names (gTLDs) designed to cater for a boom in internet users from 1.5 billion today to 6 billion.

Only a decade or so ago, during the halcyon days of the dotcom boom, more than a few people were saying the internet would make everyone in the world use English.

At the moment, a handful of firms dominate the sale of domain names and US companies retain a firm grip on the system.

ICANN's deal with the US Government, through the Department of Commerce is known as the Joint Project Agreement (JPA).

This grew out of an agreement originally signed in 1998 to create ICANN to co-ordinate the myriad domain names and internet protocol addresses - technically known as unique identifiers - that underpin the efficient working of the web.

This agreement has been extended several times. The most recent JPA will conclude by September 2009 and after much too-ing and fro-ing, including speculation for some years that the UN may want to take over ICANN, the group called for its independence last January ahead of the latest agreement's mid-point review.

The move was initiated by ICANN's international board in January in a detailed report to the US Government.

"The JPA was a necessary instrument in ICANN's formative years," chairman Peter Dengate Thrush wrote to the US Government.

"Now, the JPA contributes to a misperception that the domain name system is managed and overseen on a daily basis by the US Government. Ending the JPA will provide long-term stability and security for a model that works."

In January, when the submission was made, ICANN chief Paul Twomey said the JPA had helped to establish a "stable, strong organisation which can do this transition".

"The JPA has been fundamentally achieved and what's more important is for the Department of Commerce and ICANN to talk about the next stage."

Since the review Twomey has continued to be outspoken.

"The mid-term review of the JPA has made it very clear that not only the ICANN board, but also the many stakeholders who have invested time and energy in the original promise of private-sector-led management, want to see not just the JPA concluded, but also the entire transition discussed and implemented," he said.

ICANN has achieved a fair bit in the past decade: the introduction of competition in domain name registration services for the generic TLDs: suffixes such as .com, .org and .edu. It has set up a domain name dispute resolution policy for resolving cyber-squatting and other intellectual property disputes, has established agreements with country code operators and operates a sometimes long-winded but nonetheless transparent consultative process.

At ICANN's latest get-together in Cairo - it has three conferences each year - it released detailed guidelines of the gTLD expansion, that will take effect from next year.

ICANN wants to fully privatise the booming domain name business while retaining its supervisory role.

It has budgeted for up to 50 new firms to become involved, but it's not cheap, requiring a $185,000 application fee that appears to be non-refundable.

To add a good dollop of local interest in how Obama proceeds, Twomey is Australian, a former McKinsey consultant and one-time senior Australian tech bureaucrat, and his main Washington lobbyist, Paul Levins, is also an Aussie.

It will be a job well done if they can convince Obama to finally release ICANN from the clutches of the US Government.

sainsburym@theaustralian.com.au