Keynote Address by Assistant Secretary Strickling at the American Enterprise Institute

I want to focus on what has been happening in response to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) announcement in March that we intend to transition our stewardship role with respect to the Internet domain name system (DNS).

What is NTIA’s role today with respect to the domain name system? And what is changing?

This transition is the last step in a process that started 16 years ago when the US government committed to allowing the private sector to take leadership for domain name system management. In 1998, the Department of Commerce designated the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to perform what are known as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).

First, as ICANN has performed the IANA functions over the years, it has matured as an organization and has taken important steps to improve its accountability and transparency as well as its technical competence.

Second, as witnessed so strongly in the past several months, international support has continued to grow for the multistakeholder model of Internet governance.

And as a result, many of the Internet’s key stakeholders support this transition. NTIA's contract with ICANN simply designates it to perform the IANA functions.

Neither ICANN nor the United States pays anything to each other under this contract. Now that ICANN has demonstrated its ability to perform these functions with the support of the community, there is no longer a need for the United States to designate ICANN to perform these functions and we are not obligated to maintain a contract when it is no longer needed.