The future health of the internet comes down to ONE simple question…

The call begins again

For these and many other reasons, in the past and going into the future – where ICANN will have more than 100 times its previous contracts and a budget more than double its previous ones – the community wants independent oversight.

So much so, in fact, that its key supporting organisation – the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO) – stated on the record that it wants an independent review body.

How the GNSO relayed that message is all the more amazing. Thanks to a two-minute limit on talking imposed by ICANN’s staff at the organisation’s public forum, the supporting body lined up several speakers one after the other who used their two minutes at the microphone to read consecutive parts of the statement.

Part of that statement read: “The Board's decisions must be open to challenge and the Board cannot be in a position of reviewing and certifying its own decisions.

“We need an independent accountability structure that holds the ICANN Board, staff and various stakeholder groups accountable under ICANN's governing documents, serves as an ultimate review of board/staff decisions, and through the creation of precedent, creates prospective guidance for the board, the staff, and the entire community.”

Response

What was ICANN’s response? It announced a review process where staff would control what could be discussed and where the board would have sole control over any possible changes.

In response to that, every single one of ICANN’s organisations and committees signed a second letter insisting that they decide what could be discussed and questioning why the board should have final say over changes that would likely limit its own power.

In response, ICANN said it would let the community decide what they wanted to discuss but noted that the board would still have the final say on anything. Its CEO and chairman signed a letter [pdf] that literally said the community needed to “trust” them to make the right decisions.

“There is no inherent conflict between the board’s interests and the community’s. We must have confidence in each other, and our respective processes,” it argued.

This is not the first time that the ICANN community has tried to create a mechanism that would stop the board from being the ultimate decider of everything. It’s not even the second time. It will be the third time that there has been a formal recommendation that ICANN’s board be subject to oversight. And so far, it is determined not to budge.

When we asked ICANN’s CEO, Fadi Chehade, point-blank whether ICANN was opposed to an oversight mechanism, he told us that he couldn’t respond until there was a further formal recommendation. “Let’s let the community speak,” he urged, before saying that to be considered, the idea “would require complete consensus and more extended dialogue.”

ICANN’s chairman, Steve Crocker, was more forthcoming but was clearly opposed to the idea. He has been on the ICANN board for 12 years and so seen repeated efforts to make the board accountable beyond itself.

“This could be a slippery slope,” he told us. “I know that it doesn’t feel right that the board reviews its own decisions but the harder part is: what do you do? We have all been raised to believe in the separation of powers and legislation versus judicial, but the role of the judiciary is not to reverse or supersede decisions. The primary force is whether the community at large feels it has had a fair hearing.”

Changing the current situation, he argued, would “create more problems than it solves.”