As it was reported earlier, on Wednesday, 13th of May, the House Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet held a hearing that was to decide the fate of the controversial new domain .SUCKS. In itself this fact is not extraordinary, because “offensive” domain caused a lot of debate and many representatives of large business were initially against its delegation. However, it is alarming that the hearing is called “Stakeholder perspectives on ICANN: The .sucks Domain and Essential Steps to Guarantee Trust and Accountability in the Internet’s Operation”. It seems that through the lens of domain .SUCKS delegation, American lawmakers were willing to review and evaluate ICANN’s activities in general.
Even more remarkable is the fact that not a single ICANN representative was on the list of witnesses whose opinion was heard at the meeting. But there were plenty of lobbyists, lawyers and politicians that have many times heavily criticized the corporation. Thus, ICANN didn’t have even an opportunity to tell something to the Congressmen about the “trust and accountability” that worried them that much.
Finally, after 15 minutes of the first hearing another one started, this one held by a subcommittee of the House Energy & Commerce committee. It is called “Stakeholder Perspectives on the IANA Transition”. Probably, the issue of the transition in the key one here. American lawmakers are preparing a serious attack on ICANN by using a series of scandals with .SUCKS domain as a cause to show corporation’s ineffectiveness, and hence unpreparedness of the Internet community to exercise control over DNS root zone.
