Congress must act Now.
We have, unfortunately, come to
expect our elected representatives to shirk hard decisions. So it came as
little surprise when the Senate released the text of a continuing resolution
late last week to fund the U.S. government that did not include key objectives
sought by conservatives, such as stopping taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood.
Although there are many problems
with this budget deal, only one is irreversible and permanent: allowing the
Obama administration to cede oversight of the internet to foreign bodies. It’s
troubling that the Senate has failed to include language prohibiting this
transfer of power.
The Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the nonprofit organization responsible
for maintaining databases for internet domain names, essentially the phone book
for the internet.
The Obama administration announced
the goal of ending the U.S. contractual oversight of ICANN in 2014, and asked
ICANN to submit a plan to fill the gap of U.S. withdrawal and to implement
stronger accountability measures to make sure ICANN does not abuse its
authority.
After two years of negotiations and
effort, the Obama administration says that it is satisfied with the
proposal even though it is incomplete.
Many of the reforms deemed necessary
by the ICANN community to make ICANN accountable absent U.S. oversight will not
be complete before next summer. Likewise, important legal questions that could
threaten ICANN, the transition, or the stability of the internet remain
unanswered. Finally, the new governance model is untested—we actually do not
know if it will have the capability of governing ICANN and preventing it from
abusing its authority.
Although there are many problems
with this budget deal, only one is irreversible and permanent: allowing the
Obama administration to cede oversight of the internet to foreign bodies.
Analysts at The Heritage Foundation warn that
governments will gain new influence over the internet, that its freedom will
suffer, and that ICANN leadership (both CEO Göran Marby and staff) will
continue its troubling pattern of ignoring bylaws without the community holding
leadership accountable.
This is important. Our economy and
security are increasingly dependent on the internet. We should not be taking a
blind leap into the unknown. But that is exactly what the Obama administration
is proposing.
Lead Obama administration official
Lawrence Strickling, administrator of National Telecommunications and Information Administration, has repeatedly said
there’s not a hard deadline and that it’s better to get this right than get it
done by a specific date.
But if the
administration really believed that, why would it sign off on this
incomplete proposal when it could extend the contract for a year and allow
all of the reforms to be adopted and actually test the new ICANN governance
systems to make sure that they work like they are supposed to work?
It is quite simply reckless, but it
will happen unless Congress intervenes. Absent specific instruction otherwise
from Congress, the contractual relationship between the U.S. government and
ICANN will cease this Saturday—Oct. 1, 2016.
Once the U.S. lets the contract with
ICANN end, there is no going back. The future of the internet is too important
to risk on a half-baked proposal.
A free and secure internet is not
just the concern of Americans, but of people across the world, especially those
living under despotic regimes. Congress must think long and hard about allowing
President Barack Obama to give away the internet—because right now, that’s what
he’s on track to do. Congress has the power to stop this. Will it?
http://dailysignal.com/2016/09/26/its-now-or-never-to-save-the-internet/
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