ICANN’s Fat Tuesday

Last Tuesday (February 28, 20006 – Marde Gras), a majority of ICANN’s Board voted to approve a new .com contract that some estimate will provide total revenues on the order of $3 billion for VeriSign between now and 2012. A portion of those funds will be shared with ICANN, supporting substantial budget increases. Time for ICANN staff and loyalists to party! (A road trip to Wellington, New Zealand is planned).

Some suggest that the Board members who supported the deal will propose an ICANN budget of $50 million. What could this possibly be for? Just a few people did the whole job not so many years ago. There can’t be more than 500 people who regularly participate in the ICANN process. A $50 million budget could be hacked up to give each participant a cool $100,000 per year. Maybe that would be enough to persuade them all to stay home and stop creating complicated regulatory processes and irrelevant reports. But the actual plan may be, instead, to spread money around developing countries, to support local infrastructure and/or travel to ICANN meetings, thereby helping defuse third world efforts to re-locate “internet governance” in an “Internet Governance Forum” affiliated with the UN and/or ITU.

ICANN has systematically ignored Luther-invoking protests, tacked to its corporate door, objecting to its establishment of “everything not permitted is prohibited” regulation and its favoritism towards insiders. The ICANN-VeriSign deal is the ultimate sale of an indulgence by the not-so-catholic-anymore church of Postel. It may be one indulgence too many.

Perhaps rather than continuing to party, ICANN should prepare for a Lenten period to come. Registrars, the group previously most akin to supportive priests in the ICANN religion, are in open revolt. Secular authorities are at least considering the idea of withdrawing support – possibly re-bidding the IANA function (think of German princes protecting protestants?). China is creating its own local root (think Church of England going its own way?). Most country code TLDs have simply refused to be bound by ICANN policies – and ICANN has no option but to go along (a general decline of faith). This most recent indulgence for VeriSign may line ICANN’s coffers but it may also bring down the ICANN religion – or at least dramatically reduce the number of its adherents.

There are two rays of hope. First, one justification for the deal was that new TLDs will create competition that can keep the now-permitted .com price increases in check. This may increase pressure on ICANN to reduce roadblocks to creative uses of the DNS name space – and that could revive the DNS industry and generate a new flock of adherents. Second, ICANN has asked outside experts (the London School of Economics) to review its GNSO structures. Maybe they will see what a joke the current structure is and recommend replacing it with something better. But don’t count on it. The majority of the ICANN Board that supported the .com deal will probably see new TLDs as a way of raising even more money. And the LSE may run screaming from the room, if they ever figure out what’s really going on. Religions only reform from the bottom up – and in this case the worshippers may just stop coming to church.

Marde Gras has always been a time to try out extreme versions of worldly vices. The VeriSign float threw some pretty pearls at the ICANN in crowd. In all likelihood, the hangover will be brutal. It’s past time for ICANN to go on a diet and recall the truly limited nature of its mission. The faith that DNS operation is about service, not ownership, should apply most forcefully at the very top level. Only a collective reaffirmation that “everything not prohibited by a real consensus among affected parties is permitted” can lead the ICANN church back to an appropriate level of humility. It’s time for ICANN to call on its constituencies to worship the original Postel religion together, rather than exploiting its now fragile “ownership” of the root to prevent lawful innovation and inviting those to whom ICANN does make delegations to pay for permission to sin.