U.S. will extend Internet agreement

By Dan Caterinicchia

updated 1:45 p.m. ET Sept. 29, 2006

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Commerce Department said Wednesday it will extend its oversight of the California organization that handles domain name policies, while finding ways to improve the group's accountability and transparency.

John Kneuer, the department's acting assistant secretary for communications and information, said the government's current agreement with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers works and should continue.

Commerce plans to renew a memorandum of understanding with ICANN, but it will likely add provisions designed to address complaints that the group is sometimes too secret and makes decisions that don't reflect the Internet community at large, Kneuer said.

The current agreement expires at the end of the month, but neither Kneuer nor Paul Twomey, ICANN's president and chief executive, provided details about the length of such an extension or about any changes.

ICANN, based in Marina del Ray, Calif., with international board members, was selected in 1998 to handle the Internet's addressing issues, including the key directories that help Web browsers and e-mail programs find other computers on the Internet.

The U.S. government, which funded the Internet's early development, kept veto powers over ICANN decisions, though it has stayed largely hands-off in day-to-day operations.

A key question remains to what extent that will continue with a renewal. Many have called for Commerce to wield even less oversight of ICANN, while not cutting it off completely.

The agreement "is extremely important in that it dictates the extent to which the U.S. government will continue to play a unique role in the oversight of the Internet's Domain Name System," David McGuire of the Center for Democracy and Technology said in an interview. "This has become something that's been increasingly a bout of contention internationally."

When Commerce last renewed the agreement, in 2003, it suggested ICANN would be ready for self-sufficiency by Sept. 30, 2006. But even advocates of independence believe ICANN is still not ready.

"What we ultimately would love to see would be a completely non-governmental, bottom-up management body," McGuire said. "At this point, that's just ... not something we think is necessarily even viable."

Paul Kane, chairman of an organization for mostly European country-code domain suffixes, said Commerce still must guide ICANN to revamp its internal structures and enhance participation among its constituents, such as civil society.

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