ICANN president wants group to focus on Internet basics

IDG News Service - If the Internet were a postal system, the only job of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers would be to give each letter an address, the group's head insisted today.
Even so, ICANN President and CEO Paul Twomey realizes as much as anyone that the nonprofit group is being pushed to make decisions on issues as far-ranging as content and delivery.
VeriSign Inc.'s recent lawsuit against the organization, accusing it of trying to regulate the company's controversial Wait Listing Service (WLS) for expired domain names, is just the latest example (see story). VeriSign accused ICANN of overstepping its bounds as the Internet's technical coordinating body and delaying the implementation of its service amid protests that WLS is unfair to consumers by convincing them to back-order domain names they may never be able to register.
Under the group's charter, ICANN is responsible only for Internet Protocol address allocation, protocol identifier assignment, the Domain Name System and root server management.
"What we do is narrow, and we don't need an added role," Twomey said during an interview in London. The CEO had just wrapped up a group meeting in Rome over the weekend, where the organization decided to allow VeriSign's WLS service to go ahead for a one-year trial period, with some stipulations.
Although the board approved of the service in principle, Twomey said he hadn't heard from VeriSign whether it would drop its lawsuit. He also wasn't sure whether the organization would accept the $100,000 that registrar Go Daddy Software Inc. pledged to help fund ICANN's defense in the case (see story).
"Quite a number of people said they'd contribute, and we wouldn't say no since we are publicly funded ... but there's no way we'd take money if it was tied to conditions," he said.
Twomey claimed that "these issues are more than ICANN issues" and are a product of the contractual nature of its relationships with Internet registries. "We have agreements with registries that they openly volunteer to enter, and these disagreements are a product of these contracts," he said. "But what we are in charge of is actually very narrow."
If ICANN's function is narrow, it stands in contrast to Twomey's vision of what his organization and the Internet can actually do.
The Australian native, who has held ICANN's top post for just under a year, sees the Internet as a powerful mechanism for delivering, and exposing people to, different "voices" around the world. That's why ICANN's current focus is on making the operation of the