On October 16, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) asked the online public to provide input for how to improve the transparency and accountability of the organization’s operations. This is a very good thing. Unfortunately, the deadline ICANN set for members of the Internet community to submit comments was October 31. This is a major problem.

We applaud ICANN for attempting to address its historic deficiencies in providing adequate transparency and accountability. No issue has been more damaging to ICANN’s credibility in the Internet community. But the artificially constrained timeframe ICANN has laid out for addressing the problem has left many observers to wonder if ICANN understands the scope of the problem or the challenges the organization will face in addressing it.

ICANN’s first notice gave the Internet public two weeks to provide recommendations, and was premised on the assumption that ICANN’s board would enact new policies at the organization’s December meeting in Sao Paulo, Brazil. ICANN later issued a second notice clarifying that it was seeking only “preliminary” responses by October 31, and announcing that the board would now take up the issue in March 2007.

That still seems like an awfully short timeframe to fix what appear to be a systemic problems with ICANN’s policies and institutional culture. In our preliminary comments to ICANN we offer some suggestions for fixing the most glaring instances of opaque and unaccountable practices, but also urge ICANN to step back and commit to devoting the time and resources needed to address these issues in a way that makes the organization truly stronger and more stable.

ICANN has taken a worthy and important step in throwing these issues open for review and improvement. Now it must make sure it follows through on what it started.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 1st, 2006 at 5:06 pm and is filed under Standards & Governance. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.