The head of the private agency entrusted with running the Internet on Monday said that the group is on course to break free of US oversight late next year.
Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) chief executive officer Fadi Chehade expressed his confidence in the move during a press briefing at the opening of the nonprofit organization’s meeting this week in Los Angeles.
“ICANN is in a very solid, confident place today,” Chehade said of its readiness for a “post US-government role” in charge of the Internet addressing system.
The timeline for the shift is months rather than years, according to Chehade.
While cautioning that there was no strict deadline, he said that substantial progress has been made toward ICANN being answerable to a diverse, global group of “stakeholders” and not the just the US government, as has long been the case.
The US government in March this year announced that it is open to not renewing a contract with ICANN that expires in about 11 months, provided a new oversight system is in place that represents the spectrum of interests and can be counted on to keep the Internet addressing structure reliable.
ICANN plans to hand a proposal fitting the bill to the US Department of Commerce next year.
“If the US government is satisfied, they would not renew the contract,” Chehade said.
“There are many people in the community who would like to see us not renew the contract past 2015,” he said.
If US officials are unhappy with the proposal, the contract could be renewed for a short period to allow time for it to be revised.
Governance of the Internet is set to be a high-profile topic at the ICANN 51 meeting that is scheduled to continue through Oct. 16 in Los Angeles.
US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker on Monday addressed the gathering, affirming support for ICANN being accountable to the “global multistakeholder community” and not to any single organization.
“The United States will not allow the global Internet to be co-opted by any person, entity or nation seeking to substitute their parochial world view for the collective wisdom of this community,” she said.
The ICANN 51 agenda includes tackling whether identities of those running Web sites should be public or whether privacy should be safeguarded and operators true names revealed only with proper court orders.
Another hot topic is the historic roll-out of a vast array of new domain names that has seen controversy over Web site address endings such as .wine or .gay.
“There is quite a bit of thematic focus on the top-level domain space,” Chehade said, referring to online neighborhoods making debuts.
“ICANN is not in the content policing business; this is not what we do,” he added when asked about potential for some domain operators to allow inappropriate material.
“We just want to make sure the company that gets the domain can deliver on what they say and do it with reliability,” he said.
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