Witnesses to Hill: IANA Hand-Off Can Meet Contract Deadline

Witnesses told a House Communications Subcommittee hearing panel March 17 that they thought the US could hand off oversight of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which oversees domain naming conventions, from the US to a multistakeholder model by the time the current contract expires at the end of September.

The National Telecommunications & Information Administration currently oversees IANA under a contract that was to have expired Sept. 30, 2015, but was extended a year--with an option to extend it three more years--because the plan was not yet ready. In 2014, NTIA concluded that no single nation, including the US, should be overseeing domain names for the Internet and set the transition in motion. At the hearing, Chairman Greg Walden (R-OR) signaled that the transition should be done right, not rushed, and suggested that if need be, the contract should be extended. Steve DelBianco, executive director for NetChoice and an ICANN official, sounded confident. "We can do it," he said. "We have finished the hard work of a report that has been cleared by all of the multistakeholder members. We now have to match bylaws to that report. We've got high-paid lawyers, both for ICANN and for the [stakeholder] community. And they need to come together roughly a week from now with a draft that we can review. When that's done, the only other step is to implement the set-up of certain corporations and creating panels and we can do that in time to get this transition completed."