The End of the Experiment: The Failure of Democracy in ICANN

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has failed with its experiment in novel forms of governance and representation of the global Internet user community. ¹ Nevertheless, it will still warrant a footnote in the history books. Its inception in the late 1990s as the Internet morphed from a limited network of academics, technologists, civil servants, and other trailblazers into a widely used and incessantly discussed global phenomenon placed ICANN in an intriguing role. ICANN’s mandate to coordinate a key aspect of the Internet’s operations made it the first substantial Internet institution with a global reach. ICANN may also be worth chronicling as a sui generis institution that was at once obscure and a lightning rod for attention and criticism from government entities, legal scholars, and Internet users. These and other parties have struggled with the questions of who should govern the technical architecture of the Internet, and how to do so legitimately ² If its long-running reform process continues on its desultory path, or if time runs out on ICANN’s multiple extensions of its Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the U.S. Department of Commerce, or if its most fierce critics involved in the World Summit for the Information Society (WSIS) process get their way, ICANN may well be remembered as a case study in organizational self-destruction. ³