ICANN cuts cord to US government, gets broader oversight

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is breaking free of the US Department of Commerce. The many-times-amended Memorandum of Understanding between the two groups was replaced today with a new Affirmation of Commitments that gives international stakeholders more say in how ICANN oversees the worldwide domain name system (DNS).

The US government has exerted control over ICANN since the nonprofit group was set up in 1998. Though DNS was a worldwide system, ICANN was answerable only to the Department of Commerce, and it faced significant criticism for being slow to adopt measures useful to Web browsers in other countries—non-English characters in domain names, for instance.

Under the new agreement, ICANN remains a private nonprofit, but its accountability shifts away from the Department of Commerce. While the US government still has an oversight position, ICANN's internal reporting will now go to reviewers selected by its own Government Advisory Committee, and foreign governments and companies should have more of a say in the process. Previous reviews went only to the Department of Commerce.

This worried some US senators, who expressed their concerns in a letter this summer. One of those concerns was that ICANN remain physically headquartered in the US, and ICANN has committed to doing so.

The agreement "recognizes the importance of global Internet users being able to use the Internet in their local languages and character sets, and endorses the rapid introduction of internationalized country code top level domain names (ccTLDs), provided related security, stability and resiliency issues are first addressed." And ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom today reaffirmed his commitment to "fully supporting different scripts and languages in domain names." In 2010, Chinese and Russian characters will at last be supported in domain names.

ICANN's new agreement has attracted praise from Internet luminaries such as Vint Cerf, who helped invent the 'Net, and Google boss Eric Schmidt. More interesting was the (muted) praise from EU Commissioner Viviane Reding, who called the Affirmation "an historic opening... things are moving in the right direction."