Accountability and Transparency
Reproduced with permission from Electronic Commerce & Law Report, 21 ECLR (Mar. 2, 2016). Copyright 2016 by The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. (800-372-1033) <http://www.bna.com>
A proposal for increasing the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers’s accountability to the global Internet community was transmitted Feb. 23 to the organization’s constituent bodies for approval, after a working group settled on the final text.
Working group co-chairman Thomas Rickert said in an e-mail to the group that the final outstanding issue had been resolved and that the plan would be forwarded for approval.
The accountability plan is the last remaining part of the broader effort to remove ICANN from technical U.S. government oversight (see related story). The plan must ultimately be approved by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications & Information Administration (NTIA).
Rickert told Bloomberg BNA in a Feb. 23 e-mail that he expects the final text to pass muster. ‘‘I am confident we have finalized a proposal that enjoys broadest possible support from the community and meets NTIA requirements,’’ Rickert said. ‘‘It is a set of recommendations that will significantly enhance ICANN’s accountability and the mere fact that a diverse group such as the [working group] has managed to come up with this report is a true testimony of the multi-stakeholder model working well.’’
The plan was completed after a poll of working group participants showed broad support for a Feb. 19 proposal made by the ICANN board of directors (see related story). Under that proposal, if the board implements government advice over the objection of the rest of the ICANN participant community, that community may seek to remove all directors in a vote that would not include government stakeholders. Without government participants, the quorum for removing the directors would be lowered, making such a move more likely to succeed.
The board insisted that the lower quorum should only apply if an independent panel of arbitrators found that the board’s implementation of government advice violated ICANN’s bylaws. The working group incorporated the board’s proposal, Rickert said in his e-mail to the group.
The constituent bodies are expected to decide at a public meeting in Marrakech, Morocco, March 5-10 whether to send the plan to the NTIA for approval.
The text of the proposal can be found at https://community.icann.org/
BY JOSEPH WRIGHT
To contact the reporter on this story: Joseph Wright in Washington at jwright@bna.com
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Alexis Kramer at akramer@bna.com
