ITU's Plans For A Substantive Takeover of Internet Management Functions
Recent speeches by the Secretary-General of the United Nation's International Telecommunications Union leave little doubt that the organization is intent on replacing ICANN. According to a news story from Computer Business Review Online, the Secretary-General's statements discussing internet governance constitute "the most explicit power push yet from the ITU, which has been working, mostly quietly, to get its hands on ICANN's responsibilities over the domain name system and IP address allocation for a number of years."

The news story states that the ITU official "is pushing for the UN's Working Group on Internet Governance to state that ICANN's powers constitute Internet governance, and to recognize that many countries want the ITU to take over ICANN's role."

Thus, it appears that the U.N. is focusing less on diffuse policy issues such as "spam, illegal content, security and freedom of speech" on which it would be difficult or impossible to reach consensus. Instead, the ITU is interested in taking over the technical management of the internet. As the senior ITU official was quoted as saying, "We should focus on the core activity of the management of internet resources by ICANN, in particular top-level domains, which is where important issues remain unresolved..."

Computer Business Review explains that what is at "stake is control over two master databases the root directories of the internet's domain name system and the master list of IP address allocations.

The DNS root servers are operated by 13 commercial and volunteer operations around the world. Through agreement and tradition, they all publish ICANN-authorized data. ...

Also through agreement, ISPs only publish IP addresses acquired from regional Internet registries (RIRs), which in turn only hand out numbers that have been allocated to them by IANA, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which is a part of ICANN."

One proposal from an ITU official is that "countries dissatisfied with ICANN could turn to the ITU to take over the IANA function."

It is important to note that at least some of the ITU's ideas have met with resistance from key stakeholders. For example, the Chairman of the Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries (CENTR), "wrote that this idea would increase the bureaucracy associated with the IANA database and would be confusing." More specifically, the CENTR official stated that "Dividing the IANA database into two distinct administrations can create potential confusion rather than help in sorting out the expressed concerns."

The Regional Internet Registries have stated that "the ITU is proposing a model of IP address space distribution that is based on a limited set of considerations and has not adequately considered the need to ensure stable, fair and consistent distribution of a global resource." It was also noted that "distributing IP addresses along national lines could fragment the address space in such a way that it would interfere with route aggregation a method ISPs use to keep routing tables small and the Internet performing at speed."

Expressing a similar concern, the Japan's Internet Governance Task Force stated that "Excessive fragmentation of IPv6 address space will cause a failure of the routing system resulting in discontinuation of services to many part of the Internet."

Although much remains to be decided about the future of the technical management of the internet, two conclusions are apparent:

1) ITU management of the internet could well result in serious disruption of the internet to the detriment of all stakeholders; and

2) There is an important long-term role to be played by the US government in ensuring competent technical management of the internet for the benefit of internet users around the globe.