ICANN’s President Paul Twomey was up before Congress today, making his case for why the Joint Project Agreement (JPA) between the US Commerce Department and ICANN should be allowed to expire in September. Among his reasons: the JPA doesn’t matter and if it goes away, “nothing will change” in the relationship between the U.S. Government and ICANN.

If that’s really true, Mr. Twomey should probably tell the governments of Russia and Brazil, the European Union, the International Telecommunications Union and the slew of other foreign and intergovernmental entities that have mounted a concerted campaign to terminate the agreement.

Running an Internet domain is a little like generating nuclear power: do it right, and you safely provide an important resource to a grateful community; do it wrong, and…well, let’s just say you don’t want to do it wrong.

That may explain why business leaders are so concerned about the latest iteration of ICANN’s plan to create potentially hundreds of new Internet domains.

I did my best to highlight those concerns when I spoke before the ICANN Board at the public forum here in Mexico City Thursday. Operators of new top-level domains will have a leading role in protecting consumers from fraud and phishing scams. In addition they must prevent abusive registrations intended to extort money out of brand owners. Defending against so-called “cybersquatting” already costs companies millions of dollars annually. The introduction of an unprecedented number of domains could increase those costs exponentially, if it isn’t handled carefully.

The theory behind ICANN is that the Internet “community” – which is to say, all of us – determines what’s best for the Domain Name System (DNS). Many of us in the community have long questioned whether ICANN really allows our input to influence its decisions, but rarely are those suspicions so clearly demonstrated as they were this week.

Mike Palage, an adjunct fellow at the Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF) and longtime participant in the ICANN process, did an excellent post
on CircleID documenting the broad-based criticism of ICANN’s proposal to add hundreds of new top level domains (TLDs) to the DNS. Both the Commerce Department and the Justice Department posted substantive criticisms, as did NetChoice and many other businesses.

Picture this: Your child struggles academically. He is always sleep-deprived and barely gets his assignments in on time. He’s going into a new semester facing his toughest course-load yet … and he asks you if he should take a 20-hour-per-week after-school job.

Would you even hesitate before you rejected the idea?

Well that’s the situation facing the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The body that oversees the Internet’s Domain Name System faces the biggest challenges in its 10-year history. ICANN plans to review applications of hundreds of new Internet domains next year; it continues a massive project to “improve institutional confidence”; and it plans to sever its legacy ties with the U.S. Government.