Power and Multistakeholderism: The ICANN Experiment

Functioning under the political oversight of the US government, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is considered today as one of the most powerful private corporations in the world. It is an agreed-upon thesis in the literature on ICANN that the corporation derives its potential power from a combination of technical and political factors1 (see Mueller, 2002; Friedlander and Cooper, 2000; Froomkin, 2000; Kleinwachter, 2000; Weinberg, 2000; Holitscher, 1999; Post, 1999a, b). First, ICANN was delegated policymaking authority over the single-root Internet Domain Name System (DNS), which translated into the right to decide how many and which top-level domains would be authorized, and who would benefit from the intense user demand for registration services in the most lucrative top-level domains. And, second, ICANN enjoys the unfading US Department of Commerce’s (DoC) support, which culminated, in the context of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) debate (2003 - 2005), in sustaining the US unilateral control over ICANN2. This paper focuses on the rationalities and practices of policy-making for the Internet DNS as they emerged in the late 1990s and up to 2002, when ICANN was reformed. In this sense, it is an exercise in unraveling “the history of the present” (Michel Foucault).