Internet governance in transition: What's the destination?

[Commentary] With the decision to transition away from US control, addressing Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)’s longstanding accountability and "legitimacy" issues becomes even more pressing. If ICANN is not accountable to the US government or to other governments, to whom will it be accountable?

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, a non-profit, places a great deal of emphasis on obtaining input from the Internet "community," but in the end, it is ICANN's board that makes the decisions. That board has no external entities to which it is accountable. Meaningful accountability requires meaningful external checks, and virtually all major organizations are structured so as to be externally accountable. ICANN has no shareholders, members, or donors. The most direct way for ICANN to be externally accountable is to modify its governance structure so that board members, or at least a significant number of them, are accountable to external groups.

Our research shows that many organizations with coordination functions that are similar to ICANN's are governed by their direct users, who have a strong interest in the organization doing its job effectively. The direct users of ICANN include:

• "Registries," which are companies that coordinate gTLDs, such as .com, .edu and .org;
• "Registrars,” which register the second-level domain names that we all use, such as aol.com; and
• Regional Internet Registries (RIRs), which are responsible for distributing numeric Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that are needed for the Internet to work.

In sum, as part of this transition, the issue of ICANN external accountability urgently needs to be addressed. We believe that our suggested system of accountability to ICANN's direct users would be the best way to move to the next phase of Internet governance.

[Lenard is president and senior fellow at the Technology Policy Institute; White is a professor of economics at New York University's Stern School of Business]