ICANN as a transparent, accountable public corporation that the world can have faith in

In terms of transparency and participative governance, there is no other public corporation anywhere in the world that has established systems and practices as elaborate as ICANN has done.

To reach another person on the Internet you have to type an address into your computer - a name or a number. That address has to be unique so computers know where to find each other. ICANN coordinates these unique identifiers across the world. Without that coordination we wouldn't have one global Internet.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) coordinates the Interent's Naming system. ICANN was formed in 1998. It is a not-for-profit public-benefit corporation with participants from all over the world dedicated to keeping the Internet secure, stable and interoperable. It promotes competition and develops policy on the Internet’s unique identifiers.

It was a US Presidential directive in 1997 that led to the formation of ICANN as not-for-profit corporation based in California. The Department of Commerce maintained its oversight of ICANN through an agreement known as the Joint Project Agreement which is a topic of global discussion as the world considers it fair that Internet Governance is a muti-stakeholder affair, that needs to extend beyond the oversight of any one nation.

The JPA is under review. In this context, Paul Twomey, the CEO of ICANN filed a written testimony before the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet of the United States House of Representatives on June 4, 2009 on Issues concerning the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), including the expiration of the Joint Project Agreement between the U.S. Department of Commerce and ICANN at the end of September and the creation of new global top level domains (gTLDs).

Apart from stating his postion on the JPA, the document summarizes the elaborate participatory, transparency and accountability systems that have evolved over the years to make ICANN a model of a global public organization. ICANN has impressively taken shape with its accountablility mechanisms in three spheres as Paul Twomey narrates and it would evolve even more as a fully independant organization

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