[CWG-Stewardship] Legal Mechanisms for Governing the Transition of Key Domain Name Functions (CIGI/Paper)

[Robert Guerra]

The Global Commission on Internet Governance released a paper yesterday 
on "Legal Mechanisms for Governing the Transition of Key Domain Name 
Functions to the Global Multi-stakeholder Community".

Below is a link to the paper.


http://www.cigionline.org/sites/default/files/gcig_paper_no3.pdf

regards

Robert



Global Commission on Internet Governance Paper No. 3
SERIES: GLOBAL COMMISSION ON INTERNET GOVERNANCE PAPER SERIES
BY: AARON SHULL, PAUL TWOMEY, AND CHRISTOPHER S. YOO
PUBLISHED: NOVEMBER 26, 2014

The US government has announced that it is prepared to unilaterally 
relinquish its historical control of the key technical functions that 
make up the modern-day Internet. This control stems from the 
foundational role played by the United States in the creation of the 
Internet, and has been exercised through the law of contract over the 
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). Under the 
existing contractual arrangement, ICANN has been accountable to the US 
government for the performance of these functions. However, if the US 
government is no longer party to this agreement, then to whom should 
ICANN be accountable?

This paper, from CIGI and Chatham House’s Global Commission on Internet 
Governance, examines the existing contractual obligations that make up 
many of the core tenets of contemporary multi-stakeholder Internet 
governance. The authors maintain that these core principles should be 
preserved during the changeover by, first, transitioning the existing 
contractual accountabilities held by the US government through the law 
of contract to the existing customers of Internet Assigned Numbers 
Authority services, creating direct accountability for the performance 
of those functions between the organization performing those services 
and the organizations using them. And second, in order to increase 
support within the broader community, modest revisions could be made to 
ICANN’s independent review process to expand the grounds of review, 
allowing the review tribunal to hear additional cases on a broader range 
of complaints, with expanded powers of administrative review of
decision-making processes.

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