Notable events in history

The original mandate for ICANN came from the United States government, spanning the presidential administrations of both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. On January 30, 1998, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, issued for comment, "A Proposal to Improve the Technical Management of Internet Names and Addresses." The proposed rule making, or "Green Paper", was published in the Federal Register on February 20, 1998, providing opportunity for public comment. NTIA received more than 650 comments as of March 23, 1998, when the comment period closed.

The Green Paper proposed certain actions designed to privatize the management of Internet names and addresses in a manner that allows for the development of robust competition and facilitates global participation in Internet management. The Green Paper proposed for discussion a variety of issues relating to DNS management including private sector creation of a new not-for-profit corporation (the "new corporation") managed by a globally and functionally representative Board of Directors. ICANN was formed in response to this policy. The IANA function currently exists under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce.

On March 14, 2002, in a public meeting in Accra, in Ghana, ICANN decided to reduce direct public ("at large") participation.

One of five publicly elected board members, Karl Auerbach, sued ICANN in Superior Court in California in order to see accounting records without being required to sign a non-disclosure agreement. Auerbach won.

In September and October 2003 ICANN played a crucial role in the conflict over VeriSign's "wild card" DNS service Site Finder. After an open letter from ICANN issuing an ultimatum to VeriSign, later supported by the IAB, the company voluntarily shut down the service on October 4, 2003. Following this action, VeriSign filed a lawsuit against ICANN on February 27, 2004, claiming that ICANN had overstepped its authority. In this lawsuit, VeriSign sought to reduce ambiguity about ICANN's authority. The antitrust component of VeriSign's claim was dismissed in August 2004. VeriSign's broader challenge that ICANN overstepped its contractual rights is currently outstanding. A proposed settlement already approved by ICANN's board would resolve VeriSign's challenge to ICANN in exchange for the right to increase pricing on .com domains. At the meeting of ICANN in Rome which took place from March 2 to March 6, 2004, ICANN agreed to ask approval of the US Department of Commerce for the Waiting List Service of VeriSign.

On May 17, 2004, ICANN published a proposed budget for the year 2004-05. It included proposals to increase the openness and professionalism of its operations, and greatly increased its proposed spending from US $8.27m to $15.83m. The increase was to be funded by the introduction of new top-level domains, charges to domain registries, and a fee for some domain name registrations, renewals and transfers (initially USD 0.20 for all domains within a country-code top-level domain, and USD 0.25 for all others). The Council of European National Top Level Domain Registries (CENTR), which represents the Internet registries of 39 countries, rejected the increase, accusing ICANN of a lack of financial prudence and criticising what it describes as ICANN's "unrealistic political and operational targets". Despite the criticism, the registry agreement for the top-level domains .jobs and .travel includes a US $2 fee on every domain the licensed companies sell or renew.

Along with the successful negotiations of the .travel and .jobs namespace, .mobi, and .cat are some of the new top-level domains introduced by ICANN. The introduction of the .eu Top Level Domain to the root in violation of RFC 1591[nb 1], and the introduction of .asia are developments to watch.

After an extensive build-up that saw speculation that the United Nations might signal a takeover of ICANN, followed by a negative reaction from the US government and worries about a division of the internet the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia in November 2005 agreed not to get involved in the day-to-day and technical operations of ICANN. However it also agreed to set up an international Internet Governance Forum, with a consultative role on the future governance of the Internet. ICANN's Government Advisory Committee is currently set up to provide advice to ICANN regarding public policy issues and has participation by many of the world's governments.
ICANN meeting, Los Angeles USA, 2007. The sign refers to Vint Cerf, then Chairman of the Board of Directors, who is working on the Interplanetary Internet.

On February 28, 2006, ICANN's board approved a settlement with VeriSign in the lawsuit resulting from SiteFinder that involved allowing VeriSign (the registry) to raise its registration fees by up to 7% a year. This was criticised by some people in the US House of Representatives' Small Business committee.

On May 10, 2006 ICANN failed to approve a plan for a new ".xxx" suffix that would have been designated for websites with pornographic content. ICANN formally rejected .xxx on March 30, 2007 during its meeting at Lisbon, Portugal.

On July 26, 2006, the United States government renewed the contract with ICANN for performance of the IANA function for an additional one to five years. The context of ICANN's relationship with the U.S. government was clarified on September 29, 2006 when ICANN signed a new Memorandum of Understanding with the United States Department of Commerce (DOC).

In February 2007, ICANN began the steps to remove accreditation of one of their registrars, RegisterFly amid charges and lawsuits involving fraud, and criticism of ICANN's handling of the situation. ICANN has been the subject of criticism as a result of its handling of RegisterFly, and the harm caused to thousands of clients due to what has been called ICANN's "laissez faire attitude toward customer allegations of fraud".

On June 26, 2008 the ICANN Board approved the new gTLD program. This program would allow organizations, groups and individuals to register Internet addresses outside of the existing TLD rules. The proposed new top level domain names will expand to include common words such as .banks for all financial institutions, and so on. They will also open up to other languages that don't rely on Roman characters, such as Arabic or Chinese.

On June 27, 2008 the NYTreported that the official sites of ICANN and IANA had been defaced by Turkish hackers the prior day.

In July 2008 the U.S. Department of Commerce reiterated an earlier statement that it has no plans to transition management of the authoritative root zone file to ICANN. The letter also stresses the separate roles of the IANA and VeriSign.

Copyright 2002 webcenters