US Government wants to retain control of DNS root zone

The US government has again emphasised that it will not give up its supervisory role in the management of the root zone of the Domain Name System (DNS). In a letter to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), the US Department of Commerce explains that, although it is "open to operational efficiency measures that address governments' legitimate public policy and sovereignty concerns" with respect to the management of their country domains, it has no plans to change its own role, or the roles of ICANN and VeriSign. VeriSign is at present entrusted with passing system changes to the 13 authoritative root servers.

The internationalisation of the supervision of the central resources of the DNS and the root zone in particular, has for years been a bone of contention between the US and other governments. The two UN-backed meetings of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in 2003 and 2005 were overshadowed by a serious dispute over the internationalisation of the management of the internet and the special role of the USA, and strife over ICANN and the root zone threatened to torpedo discussions. When ICANN was set up, the complete privatisation of DNS management was a planned objective. The ICANN Board of Directors recently presented proposals in Paris, part of its programme for the final privatisation of DNS management, under which it would itself take charge of making changes to the root zone, at least in administrative respects. ICANN's chairman, Peter Dengate-Thrush, spoke of a "rationalisation" of the operation of the root zone.

As things stand, ICANN decides on changes following suggestions from interest groups, gets them sanctioned by the Department of Commerce, and then has them implemented on the system by VeriSign. Under ICANN’s plan, VeriSign would, in the future, still act as a technical service provider. The Department of Commerce promptly rejected this idea. In its current response to ICANN's "Transition Action Plan", it strongly emphasises that it has no intention of handing over management of the authoritative root zone file to ICANN.

In distinction to the statement made by the US government in 2005, shortly before the start of the second WSIS conference, on its claim to the supervision of the DNS, the Department of Commerce has made it clear that the supervision of ICANN and the root zone are two different matters. The tasks of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), it says, are not part of the Joint Project Agreement between ICANN and the US government. IANA, the Department points out, is the actual root zone manager and is the object of a separate contract, which the US government has at present allocated to ICANN.

(Monika Ermert) (jk/c't)