ICANN vows to work faster, improve transparency

Leaders expect AI and geopolitics will throw up more governance challenges and threats

Internet governance organization the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has come to the realization it needs to move faster.

The org today opened its annual conference in Bali, Indonesia, with an opening ceremony during which chair Tripti Sinha noted that it’s now just over ten years since the US government effectively handed over internet governance responsibilities from the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) to ICANN.

Sinha observed that much has changed online in the last decade, but that despite predictions to the contrary at the time of the handover, ICANN has kept multi-stakeholder internet governance alive and well.

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“A decade later, the strongest sign of success is what did not happen,” she said. “DNS did not fragment. The coordination of unique identifiers was not destabilized. The internet continues to work.”

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The chair said ICANN aims to ensure that success continues and said the org must therefore evolve.

“If the multi-stakeholder model is to remain credible, we must have the resolve to examine and where necessary enhance the mechanisms through which we hold ourselves accountable,” she said. ICANN last year commenced a “review of reviews” that Sinha said reflects the organization’s willingness to examine its own operations.

She thinks that work is necessary in part due to the advent of artificial intelligence, which she predicted will likely create new challenges for management of the resources ICANN tends to.

“Agents could reshape DNS traffic patterns and intensify demand on the systems that enable discovery, authentication, and trust online,” she said, adding that AI could both create more malicious DNS registrations and help to defend against them.

“ICANN must anticipate change without rushing ahead of evidence, innovating without compromising trust,” she said, calling for the body to deliver “Governance capable of adapting to the speed of emerging risk.”

ICANN CEO Kurt Erik Lindqvist touched on similar themes in his speech, calling for the body to improve its ability to support and action community priorities.

“Policy development is at the heart of this community,” he said. “Different interests and perspectives have to be heard, tested, and reconsidered. Once the community has done that work ,and recommendations become policy, ICANN has a responsibility to understand what the implementation requires, to make the necessary resources available to sequence the work sensitively, and to be clear about our progress and the choices we are making along the way.”

Citing recent successful work on DNS abuse mitigation, Lindqvist said ICANN knows it can nail this process.

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“That experience showed that we are responding with pace when the objective is clear, responsibilities are understood, and there is alignment around what needs to happen next,” he said. “I would like us to bring that same discipline and rigor to more of our work.”

He therefore called for ICANN to be at its best, more often.

“There will always be more work than there is time, people, and resources allow us to pursue simultaneously,” he said. “I want to work with the community on how to strengthen the connection between strategy, prioritization, budgeting, and implementation, and how to make that process more clear and transparent.” ®

Bootnote: The Reg is attending ICANN's conference. Feel free to get in touch if you want to catch up here.