ICANN is not a boring bureaucracy

When you arrive in Dublin for ICANN84 and people—customs agent, hotel receptionist, bookstore clerk—ask what brings you to town, you tell them you’ve come for an “internet governance conference,” and you can almost hear them thinking how dull that sounds. That they’d rather go to their nephew’s eighth grade graduation. No follow up questions. If you tell them it’s dot com’s 40th birthday, that gets them thinking a bit, more interested. They know dot com! In fact they used dot com just this morning, or no—five minutes ago while waiting for the coffee to brew. But ICANN? Sounds boring.

If you’ve never heard of ICANN, you’d Google it and find that it’s the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. That its mission is “to help ensure a stable, secure, and unified global Internet.” If you kept poking around its website or joined one of many video webinars open to the public (the word webinar itself signaling boring), you’d drown in acronyms. ICANN is self-aware and self-deprecating about its acronym problem. The list I jotted down throughout the week is not nearly exhaustive, but: ICANN, IANA, DNS, ccTLD, gTLD, IDN, UA, WHOIS, RDAP, RDRS, RSP, RIR, GAC, GNSO, ccNSO, ASO, NSO, NCSG, ALAC, AGB, ASP, IRT, IRP, PDP, DASC, DNSSEC, TMCH, WSIS+20, …

I’m here to tell you that ICANN is not boring.

So what even is ICANN

ICANN makes the rules for domain names and IP addresses, mostly.

ICANN does not police content on the internet. Case in point: in 2022, Ukraine asked ICANN to shut down all Russian domains (ending in .ru). ICANN declined.

ICANN the Org and ICANN the Community are not the same, and they are often at odds. ICANN the Org, a nonprofit nearly 500 strong, exists to bring ICANN the Community together to agree on some rules. To ensure every voice is heard. Every voice means: the deeply technical ones (often but not always of the glasses-and-beard stereotype); domain sellers (registries/registrars); trademark/IP lawyers; Big Tech; governments; academics; businesses; human rights/privacy groups; plus end users and whoever else wants to participate. ICANN calls this governance model multistakeholder, which actually turns out to be an important, not-boring label (more on that in a moment).

ICANN the Org does not want to be at odds with the Community, but it literally can’t not be. Someone or another will be upset at nearly every turn. The goal is to make everyone the world over happy with one shared internet. It’s tradeoffs all the way down.

Privacy versus law enforcement

Like, there’s the privacy versus law enforcement tradeoff. In a nutshell, some stakeholders (read: governments) want full access to domain owners’ contact info and identity so that law enforcement can track down criminals...and maybe also surveil their citizens. Other stakeholders, like the NCSG (oof, another acronym: Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group) argue that contactability should not threaten anonymity. Here’s an NCSG member during Wednesday’s heated session, Accuracy: Can We Have Anonymity and a Secure Internet? (emphasis mine):

Expanding the definition of accuracy beyond contactability risks excluding users and undermining trust, and will have severe human rights impact. There will be over-collection of data, and there will be surveillance and censorship risks.

They cited a study on surveillance in China enabled by its cybersecurity law, and also the recent Discord data breach as a warning against identity collection. On the other side, the .uk registry’s lawyer argued that anonymity is not a human right, that registries are bound by their local laws, and that ID data need not be stored permanently (just like how each of us showed our government-issued ID at the ICANN84 check-in desk, as many in the room pointed out). In that same meeting, one law enforcement perspective:

GDPR messed everything up. It was about the human right of privacy. So, you have to trust laws and that the companies will protect your data.

Dozens of people joined in on the argument, which is fascinating and complex but beyond the scope of this email to properly cover (do watch the recording if you’re interested). The session wasn’t long enough, and the room wasn’t big enough. The last comment closed it out: “I’ve been in ICANN for 26 years. This topic has not gone away.”

That debate was just one of many, hidden between the color-coded PowerPoints throughout the week. There were plenty of grab-the-popcorn moments during public forums, with some comments receiving emphatic audience applause and one even getting a loud boo from the crowd.

M u l t i s t a k e h o l d e r

ICANN’s multistakeholder governance model is itself another boringness trap. But don’t fall in it! The whole point of ICANN at its inception (back in 1998) was to ensure the internet would be kept open and governed by the global community—not governments. Yes, governments participate in ICANN the Community, but they have just another seat at the table. Contrast this with the UN’s intergovernmental model where member states have votes. ICANN is meant to be bottom-up, decentralized—just like the Internet—whereas the UN is top-down, yay-nay-gavel.

Government as just another stakeholder wasn’t really true until 2016, though, when the US Commerce Department’s NTIA agency ended its contract with ICANN, just a few years after Snowden’s NSA leak. I’ll save that story for another day (eleventh hour Congressional challenge and all), but suffice it to say the US still has residual outsized influence over ICANN. For one, ICANN is a nonprofit incorporated in California. The Indonesian government representative asked last week what recourse is available if they don’t like ICANN’s decision about a new gTLD in 2026. Sue in California court, it seems.

How does multistakeholder work? Stakeholders, shepherded by the Org, work together over months and years to draft documents with input from far and wide. It can be painstakingly slow, which many participants were quick to point out (even calling it a meme). Final documents—like the ~400 page 2026 gTLD Applicant Guide Book, which took 6 years—are approved by the ICANN Board. The Board themselves are of course fallible humans, stakeholders with skin somewhere in the game as registry operators, government representatives, and what not (the Board has noticeable representation from the US, btw).

Over the course of an ICANN policy’s lifespan, people involved change jobs and move; government administrations turn over. Institutional knowledge is hard earned and hard to transfer. Slow as it may be, the global cooperation and coordination at work to keep the internet humming (names and numbers, anyway) is kind of amazing. Conference sessions were translated live in 7 languages¹. Thousands of people came to Dublin for ICANN84 from dozens of countries. ICANN holds three meetings per year, traveling all over the world to meet in person. And I realize now that’s really important—the face-to-face part. Some people have been going to these meetings since ICANN1 in Singapore. Standing ovations for Becky Burr and Maarten Botterman at their final Board meeting felt genuine. I had already accrued respect for Becky and Maarten in less than a week, even, just watching them operate.

I’m a stakeholder, oops

The meta result of me going to the conference is that now I feel like I’m part of that multistakeholder community (yawn). Technically I guess I was already, and so are you, as an end user. I already cared about the internet’s stability. I was already worried about things like fragmentation risk (the “Splinternet”). But now it feels more personal. I met a lot of friendly, interesting people last week. And as a result I care about them enough to want to get it right in my book, to do right by the people I’ve met who’ve helped me start to understand this world. That’s a good thing! It’ll make the book better.

I don’t mean to overstate some sappy personal angle—I mean, I just met these people. I’ll be an objective critic as I learn more about the Org and the Community. ICANN already has its critics, so I won’t be the first. I went to the conference to be a fly on the wall, a detached journalist², but I was drawn into the Community current. I guess that’s the multistakeholder model working?

Footnotes

(1) But again, ICANN’s Western roots are all over the place: there are translations of the 2026 gTLD Applicant Guide Book, but the English version is the authoritative one, and applications must be in English.

(2) I don’t think of myself as a Journalist, not quite. “Programmer-writer” is the label I most closely identify with at the moment, but who cares.