The latest Republican Convention ends today in Cleveland. Yesterday the delegates approved the program which sets out the basic principles of Republicans’ politics. It is a 66-page document, however only half of the page is dedicated to the issues of Internet governance and IANA Stewardship Transition in particular. Domain Incite called views of the Republicans on Internet governance and IANA Transition simply “paranoid”. It’s hard to disagree with this affective evaluation.
Here are several quotes from the document. “The survival of the internet as we know it is at risk… The President… threw the internet to the wolves, and they — Russia, China, Iran, and others — are ready to devour it… We will therefore resist any effort to shift control toward governance by international or other intergovernmental organizations… The only way to safeguard or improve these systems is through the private sector.”
The last statement is especially noteworthy. The issue here is that the plan of transition of DNS root zone management adopted by ICANN is meant to reduce the role of government agencies and increase the influence of “private sector”. For example, the role of GAC ICANN (Government Advisory Committee) is decreasing. Decisions concerning the key issues could be made by it only by consensus. Therefore, Russia, China and all other “wolves” will have to be backed up by more than 150 other governments to “devour” the Internet. And even it if happens, multistakeholder model of government provides mechanisms to block decisions of GAC by representatives of Internet community. All of this is very clearly described in the documents that ICANN presented to the US government. Those behind the Republican Party program obviously didn’t bother to read them.
