US-Government’s Role in ICANN-VeriSign Struggle
“The Villain in the ICANN-VeriSign Struggle is the U.S. Government”, that is the title of a very intersting article by Michael Roberts, posted on Feb. 20, 2006 in CircleID.
Roberts gives a nice overview on the history of outsourcing the assignment of Internet domain names from the Networking Division of the National Science Foundation to a corporate predecessor of VeriSign. He states:
“Unfortunately, the contractual agreement used was of a form designed to facilitate the transfer of government funded technology from research agenices to the private sector where it could be properly commercialized. Only after dot-com had become a multi-billion dollar government granted monopoly service did people see that a public good was being converted into enormous and unwarranted private gain.”
Roberts points out that monopolies require regulation.
“ICANN, VeriSign and the government currently are bound to each other in an icestuous legal triangle in front of which an appearance of public -private partnership is maintained. This arrangemnet masks the monopoly related tensions which have surfaced in the latest contract renewal debate… In truth, VeriSign is still protected from government anti-monopoly action by its residual cooperative agreement with the Department of Commerce. ”
I think the question of the internet infrastructure as a public good and what legal framework is needed to give that concept a stable basis would be a very interesting issue for the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Athens this year.
