Icann: "Disorganised, ineffective, understaffed and underfunded"

The head of the body that governs global internet policy has proposed radical changes to the organisation's structure after admitting it has largely failed to live up to its promise.

The changes will ensure that governments around the world have a hand in internet affairs, but will remove the input of ordinary internet users, currently enshrined in the body's constitution.

Stuart Lynn, president of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), listed its accomplishments, then added: "Icann is still not fully organised, and it is certainly not yet capable of shouldering the entire responsibility of global DNS management and co-ordination.

"Icann has also not shown that it can be effective, nimble, and quick to react to problems. Icann is overburdened with process, and at the same time underfunded and understaffed.

"For these and other more fundamental reasons, Icann in its current form has not become the effective steward of the global internet's naming and address allocation systems."

Icann was formed in 1998 to take over day-to-day control of the management of the core services of the internet from the US government.

However, Lynn now believes the idea to make it a wholly private organisation was wrong, and led to the organisation being isolated from real-world institutions. He proposes to invite five government appointees onto the board of Icann, to ensure government involvement and support.

He also proposes that the input of ordinary internet users - currently half of the Icann board has to be from the general web public - should be abandoned.

The changes have brought a strong reaction from the US already, with US wires quoting fellow Icann board member Karl Auerbach as saying: "We've just had the equivalent of the president of the United States abolishing Congress."

However, in the UK, response has been more muted.

UK domain name registrar Nominet declined to comment, and said only that it needs time to analyse the proposals in detail. Others, including the ISP Association and the London Internet Exchange were unable to put forward spokespeople.

Icann has been heavily criticised in the last year for being undemocratic and unresponsive.

In January a storm blew up after European domain registries stopped paying subscriptions to Icann after it refused to be held responsible in service level agreements for the root servers which are the basis of the internet.