Government Crisis on the Internet
The informal "government of the Internet" is losing its chairman. As Esther Dyson said, in the fall she plans to leave her post as head of ICANN, the non-profit organization that regulates the distribution of names on the Internet. Dyson announced her resignation precisely at the time of the election of the ICANN Board of Directors.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers was created two years ago as a result of reform of the Internet domain name registration system. The reason for the reform was the scandal surrounding the American company Network Solutions, which the Internet community accused of monopolizing the market for name registration services. The US government intervened in the scandal, and under an agreement with it, ICANN became the main body determining policy in the Internet address space, and the registration process itself was transferred to independent registrars.
But there was one more problem: ICANN, and with it the entire Internet, which had long ago become a global property, was still controlled by the Americans. The situation should be corrected by a special AtLarge Membership program, under which five of ICANN's 19 directors will be elected this fall from the five main regions of the world. At the same time, ICANN tried to make the election procedure as democratic as possible: representatives of the regions will be chosen by Internet users themselves, who managed to register in the program before July 31. There were 158 thousand voters, of which 2,111 were Russians. Until September 8, a list of candidates will be formed (applicants must receive more than 2% of the votes in their region), for which the final vote will take place in October. Thus, for the first time, non-Americans, including Russians, can enter the world “Internet bureaucracy”: the head of the Internet department of Rostelecom, Dmitry Burkov, and the general director of the Best company, Nikolai Popkov, nominated their candidacies for the ICANN board of directors. They, however, will have to compete with other candidates from Europe.
There has always been a struggle for control of domain name registrations. It is in this area that the entire Internet bureaucracy is concentrated. The importance of ICANN is also increasing in connection with the project of introducing new entry-level domains. In the .com, .org and .net domains it is already extremely difficult to find a free name, and ICANN is preparing new domains such as .store, .inc, .shop, .info or .bank (they say that even “adult” .xxx domains may appear or .sex). Naturally, there is no shortage of people who want to intercept ICANN's powers. For example, in July, a manifesto for a project called People for Internet Responsibility was published, the authors of which propose to replace ICANN with creating a new international organization in which all sectors of the Internet community will be represented.
And it was during this period that ICANN Chair Esther Dyson announced her resignation. She has not yet given any comments, saying only that she has invested a lot of effort in ICANN and intends to become its best critic, but from the outside. Esther Dyson is well known in Russia (she is an investor in a number of Russian companies), and her departure from ICANN will not benefit the Russian Internet.

VASILY Kommersant-BUROV, IVAN Kommersant-PETROV

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 159 dated 08.29.2000, p. 4