Officials at the
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) have a tough job
ahead of them — getting its constituents to foot an annual budget that
continues to grow by the year.
The group adopted
its latest budget last month, which nearly doubled the previous year’s
budget, partly by granting concessions (namely price caps) to registrars voicing
their displeasure
over funding 70 percent of the $15.8 million plan.
In the future, ICANN plans to get other constituents to pay up in order to
meet the goals established for it by the U.S. Department of Commerce. The
department wants ICANN to
become an autonomous
international body free of government oversight over management of the
world’s most popular generic top-level domains (gTLD) like .com, .net and
.org. One of those plans involves getting the owners of country code TLDs
(ccTLD) domains to pitch more into the treasury, a group that’s historically
been at odds with ICANN.
Tom Barrett is in a unique position within the ICANN community. He is the
president and CEO of the PW Registry, a company managing the ccTLD extension
.pw for the government of the Republic of Palau, a tiny island nation in the
North Pacific Ocean. He is also the owner of Encirca, a registrar catering
mainly to trademark owners.
As both a ccTLD registry and registrar owner, Barrett isn’t necessarily
restricted to defending one at the expense of the other. Not surprisingly,
perhaps, is the fact he thinks neither group should pay for most of ICANN’s
budget.
Q: ICANN doesn’t enjoy a very successful relationship with ccTLDs. Have
relations improved recently?
ICANN’s biggest challenge is to get ccTLDs to come on board. They’re
facing a big challenge in terms of the fact that in next year’s budget they
expect a third of that budget to come from ccTLDs, and the ccTLDs there are
not playing along at this point. In fact, there are only 10 ccTLDs that
have a contract with ICANN today; we happen to be one of them. [ICANN’s]
got a ways to go, but when you look at what the alternatives might be, I
think
ICANN’s the best option.
Q: So you’re not a fan of the idea that the International
Telecommunication Union (ITU) take Internet governance out of the hands of
ICANN?
I’m not a fan. I think that the complaints about how slow ICANN moved on
some fronts, such as introducing new TLDs, I think the ITU would be even
slower and would be bogged down in bureaucracy, similar to how the U.N. is
bogged down today. And the ITU is part of the U.N. When you weigh out what
[ICANN’s] accomplished the last few years, it’s quite a bit, and I think
they’re doing a good job.
Q: ICANN’s mandate with the U.S. Department of Commerce is to act
as a technical body to ensure the safety and stability of the Internet.
Are they prepared to be a policy-setting body also?
One of the biggest objections to [VeriSign’s] wildcards wasn’t that it was
the illegal use of DNS — it’s a documented feature of DNS. Their
objections to it were more policy than technology. If you look at how ICANN
handles intellectual property, that’s pure policy; how they handle privacy,
that’s pure policy. So they’re already a policy body. Again, I don’t know
who you would turn to if they were not in that business.
So, for example,
as a registrar, one of the bigger issues is the future of registrar
transfers
that enable people to have portability of their address when they move from
one registrar to another. If ICANN was not facilitating that consensus
policy process, it would not take place; no one would be motivated to make
it happen. I think they play an important role there.
Q: ICANN is looking for alternative ways of getting money from its
constituents. Do you think it’s going to work?
I do not think that’s going to happen, and I think ICANN needs to go to some
other stakeholders in the business. For example, who’s got the most to lose
if something goes wrong on the Internet today? It’s companies like
Amazon.com, Yahoo.com, Google.com — yet all these companies do is pay in
$10 a year for their asset that’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars. We
need to come up with a system where they contribute more to ensure the
stability of the Internet. Clearly, they are not represented, nor do they
feel they need to be a part of this process. But they are the ones with the
most to lose if things don’t run right.
Q: Doesn’t that remove the need for registrars entirely if companies
have to pay in directly to ICANN?
You may see that. In fact, Amazon.com already is a registrar, and AOL is
obviously already one. I’m not sure they’re going to necessarily decide to
put in the infrastructure, but surely there must be a way for them to
contribute to the ICANN budget. ICANN is concerned with a lot more things
than just registration, but I do think that the model that exists today,
where registrars are paying 70 percent of the budget, simply doesn’t scale.
If they can’t find alternative sources of funding, then I think they should
just go to a per-domain name tax and collect it from the registries and not
go through the registrars.
Q: What about making individual government’s pay part of the bill?
Well, now you’re back to the U.N. model. If you move to a U.N. model, then I
wonder if you would see that same disparity.