ICANN CEO Considers Future of Internet Governance

Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) will soon host an event with Mr. Fadi Chehade, the CEO of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).

The event, titled ‘The Future of Internet Governance,” will be held on Monday, November 24 at noon. Mr. Chehade will review the changing Internet governance landscape and look ahead to likely shifts, including those at ICANN. Dean Merit E. Janow will moderate.

Issues at Stake

In 2015 the agreement between ICANN, a not-for-profit, and the US Department of State will expire. The Department has signaled its intention to “transition key Internet domain name functions [from ICANN] to the global multi-stakeholder community” during the coming year.

This marks an important change in the way many important functional elements of the Internet, such as the Domain Name Service, will be governed. Who will gain these new responsibilities, under which governance structure, and how will ICANN fit into the new system?

Mr. Chehade’s discussion will address these questions in light of the past year’s events, including the Montevideo Statement on the Future of Internet Governance in October 2013; the first meeting of the High-Level Panel on Global Internet Co-operation and Governance Mechanisms, chaired by Estonian President Toomas Ilves in London in December 2013; a Multi-stakeholder Agreement emerging from the NETmundial conference in Brazil in April 2014; the UN-sponsored Internet Governance Forum in Istanbul, Turkey, in September 2014; and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) 2014 Plenipotentiary meeting in Busan, Korea in November 2014.

The Talk

Mr. Chehade’s talk, like these conferences and agreements, will address fundamental questions about how the Internet will be governed and whether a shift to a multilateral model, coordinated through the UN and ITU, is at hand.

Discussants will be Gordon Goldstein, managing director and head of external affairs at Silverlake Partners, and Andrew McLaughlin, partner at betaworks, CEO of Digg and Instapaper and senior fellow in Cyber-security and Internet Governance at SIPA.

Mr. Goldstein was recently a member of the United States government and industry delegation to the ITU’s 2014 Plenipotentiary Conference in Busan, Korea. Mr. McLaughlin helped launch and manage ICANN from 1999-2003. Both have a unique perspective into the current Internet governance due to their history and involvement in many of the key organizations that comprise the current multi-stakeholder model of governance.

Tech and Policy @ SIPA

This event is the first in what will be a series of activities sponsored by a two-year grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to support research and discussion of cyber-security, internet governance, and innovation policy at SIPA.

Other SIPA activities around technology and public policy include: interdisciplinary academic research on cyber policy and internet governance, a new curriculum around tech and policy, new collaborations with the School of Engineering around data analytics, a new start-up lab for alumni tech entrepreneurs, and new graduate student challenge grants that invite students to combine data and information and communications technology (ICT) to address urban challenges globally.