I Think ICANN.

• Author: Taylor, Jeff A.
• Position: Brief Article

Given its pace, the history of the Internet has to be written as it unfolds. Wait too long and what once seemed like important technical issues become as quaint as the relative merits of various cuneiform styli.

For Syracuse University's Milton Mueller, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is too important not to have a bio, starting now. For much of the 1990s, a government contractor, Network Solutions Inc., assigned Internet domain names ending in .com, .net, and .org. Then as now, registrants paid for the domain names, which they must renew periodically. In 1998, amid squabbles over fees, the U.S. Commerce Department chartered ICANN as a non-governmental nonprofit to I oversee the task. The goal was the worthy one of "industry self-regulation."

In the December 1999 issue of Info, Mueller argues that ICANN has been a failure that has only increased government oversight of the Net. Most important, he says, ICANN never created a real system of property rights for domain names, one in which registrants would actually own their domain names outright, rather than effectively lease them.

Reason Express writer Jeff A. Taylor spoke to Mueller recently by phone.

Q: You write that "the 'self-regulatory regime' being constructed by ICANN is actually far more centralized and controlling in nature than the pre-ICANN Internet," with the Commerce Department announcing "its intention to retain 'policy authority'" over domain names indefinitely. A pretty bleak outcome for a process that was supposed to get...