The Senate will hear testimony Wednesday from critics and the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers.
Critics say the ICANN, a California company, has not moved fast enough to protect the security of the Internet's domain name system, which translates common Web site addresses to strings of numbers understood by computers.
"ICANN's legitimacy and effectiveness as the private sector manager of the domain name system [remains] in question," the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said in testimony prepared for the hearing by the Senate Commerce subcommittee on science, technology and space.
The report, obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press, said the Commerce Department has not assumed a strong enough role in overseeing ICANN. Commerce's public comments have been "general in nature and infrequent," and no detailed minutes exist of meetings between ICANN and Commerce officials.
The ICANN's president, Stuart Lynn, who plans to resign next year, defended his group.
"ICANN has been very successful by any real measure of what success is," Lynn said. He said Commerce already has "tremendous oversight" over the ICANN's work.
Lynn announced plans for a reorganization of the ICANN several months ago. The plan has not been approved yet, but it already has outraged critics because it would remove elected ICANN board members.
Assistant Commerce Secretary Nancy Victory plans to testify Wednesday as well. Her spokesman would not answer questions before the hearing.
Criticisms of the ICANN prompted Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., to threaten the ICANN with legislation that would make the future of the ICANN depend on a complete reorganization.
"ICANN has clearly exceeded its authority and mutated into a supranational regulatory body lacking oversight," Burns said. "Clearly, this legislation needs to happen as soon as possible and should be crafted with an eye to giving the U.S. a greater oversight role over ICANN."
Burns is the senior Republican on the subcommittee.
Andy Davis, a spokesman for Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., the Commerce Committee chairman, said Hollings has no position on the ICANN's fate. Davis said Wednesday's hearings are "the big first step" into the debate, the first hearing since the Democrats gained control of the Senate last year.
The ICANN controls the Internet's domain name system -- which allots the .com, .org, .edu and other identifying tags at the end of Web site addresses -- through a 1998 agreement with the Commerce Department. The deal was supposed to be only a transition step, and the ICANN was supposed to cede control to another private company or organization in 2000. Infighting and delays within the ICANN has extended the deal to this September.
The company has governed creation of new domain names, such as .info and .name, and created more competition in domain name sales. One of the ICANN's largest jobs was to formalize the ad-hoc system of Internet governance. Besides the common .com and .org, about 240 two-letter country domains, such as .fr for France.
Some of these country domains are maintained by a single company or a single person, with little oversight or accountability. Commerce told the ICANN to make formal agreements with the domain operators, but congressional investigators found that only two of the 240 deals were reached.
The ICANN also was supposed to develop security policies to protect the 13 root servers at the heart of the Internet's domain system. These servers, positioned around the world, serve as central directories so that every Web user can find Web addresses. If those servers were somehow knocked off-line or attacked by hackers or terrorists, entire swaths of the Internet would be unreachable to most people.
The GAO report notes that the ICANN created a committee to enhance root-server security, but the report is overdue. The ICANN's Lynn said the root-server system was designed for backup protection.
"It's an extremely stable and secure system," Lynn said. "Security was important to the root servers long before 9-11."
Two other critics of the ICANN, Alan Davidson of the civil liberties group Center for Democracy and Technology and one board member of the ICANN, Karl Auerbach, are scheduled to testify.
Auerbach, elected to represent the United States and Canada on the ICANN's board, has been among the ICANN's toughest critics. He plans to testify that the ICANN is riddled with bias and favoritism toward large Internet companies and says its management is fiscally irresponsible.
"I do exactly what the directors of Enron should have done," Auerbach said in an interview: "I'm asking questions."
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