Today on Capitol Hill, the House Energy and Commerce Committee is holding a hearing on the NTIA’s recent announcement that it will relinquish its small but important administrative role in the Internet’s domain name system. The announcement has alarmed some policymakers with a well-placed concern for the future of Internet freedom; hence the hearing. Tomorrow, I will be on a panel at ITIF discussing the IANA oversight transition, which promises to be a great discussion.

My general view is that if well executed, the transition of the DNS from government oversight to purely private control could actually help secure a measure of Internet freedom for another generation—but the transition is not without its potential pitfalls.

The NTIA’s technical administration of the DNS’ “root zone” is an artifact of the Internet’s origins as a U.S. military experiment. In 1989, the government began the process of privatizing the Internet by opening it up to general and commercial use. In 1998, the Commerce Department created ICANN to oversee the DNS on a day-to-day basis. The NTIA’s announcement is arguably the culmination of this single decades-long process of privatization.

The announcement also undercuts the primary justification used by authoritarian regimes to agitate for control of the Internet. Other governments have long cited the United States’ unilateral control of the root zone, arguing that they, too, should have roles in governing the Internet. By relinquishing its oversight of the DNS, the United States significantly undermines that argument and bolsters the case for private administration of the Internet.

The United States’ stewardship of the root zone is largely apolitical. This apolitical approach to DNS administration is precisely what is at stake during the transition, hence the three pitfalls the Obama administration must avoid to preserve it.

The first pitfall is the most serious but also the least likely to materialize. Despite the NTIA’s excellent track record, authoritarian regimes like Russia, China, and Iran have long lobbied for the ITU, a clumsy and heavily politicized U.N. technical agency, to take over the NTIA’s duties. In its announcement, the NTIA said it would not accept a proposal from an intergovernmental organization, a clear rebuke to the ITU.

Nevertheless, liberal governments would be wise to send the organization a clear message in the form of much-needed reform. The ITU should adopt the transparency we expect of communications standards bodies, and it should focus on its core competency—international coordination of radio spectrum—instead of on Internet governance. If the ITU resists these reforms at its Plenipotentiary Conference this fall, the United States and other countries should slash funding or quit the Union.

ICANN’s Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) presents a second pitfall. Indeed, the GAC is already the source of much mischief. For example, France and Luxembourg objected to the creation of the .vin top-level domain on the grounds that “vin” (wine) is a regulated term in those countries. Brazil and Peru have held up Amazon.com’s application for .amazon despite the fact that they previously agreed to the list of reserved place names, and rivers and states were not on it. Last July, the U.S. government, reeling from the Edward Snowden revelations, threw Amazon and the rule of law under the bus at the GAC as a conciliatory measure.

ICANN created the GAC to appease other governments in light of the United States’ outsized role. Since the United States is giving up its special role, the case for the GAC is much diminished. In practice, the limits on the GAC’s power are gradually eroding. ICANN’s board seems increasingly hesitant to overrule it out of fear that governments will go back to the ITU and complain that the GAC “isn’t working.” As part of the transition of the root zone to ICANN, therefore, new limits need to be placed on the GAC’s power. Ideally, it would dissolve the GAC.

The third pitfall comes from ICANN itself. The organization is awash in cash from domain registration fees and new top-level domain name applications—which cost $185,000 each—and when the root zone transition is completed, it will face no external accountability. Long-time ICANN insiders speak of “mission creep,” noting that the supposedly purely technical organization increasingly deals with trademark policy and has aided police investigations in the past, a dangerous precedent.

How can we prevent an unaccountable, cash-rich technical organization from imposing its own internal politics on what is supposed to be an apolitical administrative role? In the long run, we may never be able to stop ICANN from becoming a government-like entity, which is why it is important to support research and experimentation in peer-to-peer, decentralized domain name systems. This matter is under discussion, among other places, at the Internet Engineering Task Force, which may ultimately play something of a counterweight to an independent ICANN.

Despite these potential pitfalls, it is time for an Internet that is fully in private hands. The Obama administration deserves credit for proposing to complete the privatization of the Internet, but we must also carefully monitor the process to intercept any blunders that might result in politicization of the root zone.

ICANN is meeting in Durban, South Africa this week, and this morning, its Governmental Advisory Committee, which goes by the delightfully onomatopoetic acronym GAC, announced its official objection to the .amazon top-level domain name, which was set to go to Amazon, the online purveyor of books and everything else. Domain Incite reports:

The objection came at the behest of Brazil and other Latin American countries that claim rights to Amazon as a geographic term, and follows failed attempts by Amazon to reach agreement.

Brazil was able to achieve consensus in the GAC because the United States, which refused to agree to the objection three months ago in Beijing, had decided to keep mum this time around.

The objection will be forwarded to the ICANN board in the GAC’s Durban communique later in the week, after which the board will have a presumption that the .amazon application should be rejected.

The board could overrule the GAC, but it seems unlikely.

This is a loss for anything resembling rule of law on the Internet. There are rules for applying for new generic TLDs, and the rules specifically say which geographic terms are protected. Basically, anything on this list, known as ISO 3166-1 is verboten. But “Amazon” is not on that list, nor is “Patagonia;” .patagonia was recently withdrawn. Amazon and Patagonia followed the rules and won their respective gTLDs fair and square.

The US’s decision to appease other countries by remaining silent is a mistake. The idea of diplomacy is to get countries to like you so that you can get what you want on policy, not to give up what is right on policy so that other countries will like you. I agree with Milton Mueller, whose bottom line is:

What is at stake here is far more important than the interests of Amazon, Inc. and Patagonia, Inc. What’s really at stake is whether the Internet is free of pointless constraints and petty political objections; whether governments can abuse the ICANN process to create rights and powers for themselves without any international legislative process subject to democratic and judicial checks and balances; whether the alternative governance model that ICANN was supposed to represent is real; whether domain name policy is made through an open, bottom-up consensus or top-down by states; whether the use of words or names on the Internet is subject to arbitrary objections from politicians globalizing their local prejudices.

PFF Adjunct Fellow Mike Palage, who served on the ICANN board from 2003 to 2006, filed these comments (PDF) on the NTIA’s recent Notice of Inquiry regarding ICANN’s future.  Mike’s four key points were as follows:

1. ICANN’s Periodic Review of its internal operations and supporting organizations has failed, and has become nothing more than a “perpetual motion machine of public comments and documentation producing no meaningful results.” Only a second Evolution and Reform Process can solve ICANN’s current deficiencies;
2. ICANN must hardcode into its policies and its contracts the principle that its policies cannot supersede national laws;
3. ICANN must cease any operational role in technical infrastructure as required by its bylaws and focus instead on its mission as a technical coordinator; and
4. Congress must avoid “kicking the JPA can down the road” and instead provide much-needed leadership by creating a solid foundation for ICANN 3.0 in legislation after proper consultation with the Government Accountability Office.