Internet Governance: The ICANN Experiment (Or, Three Paradoxes in Search of a Paradigm)

Abstract

By political and historical accident, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has emerged as an ambitious experiment in the governance of the domain name system and the Internet addressing system, which are two key technical components of the Internet. The twin goals of this essay are to describe briefly what ICANN is and what it does, exposing some seeming paradoxes along the way, and to suggest that whatever metric one applies to ICANN’s actions there is some cause for concern.

Keywords: Internet governance, ICANN, Internet law, cyberlaw, domain name system, DNS