Crash Goes ICANN's Multistakeholder Model

Authors

Kathryn Kleiman, American University Washington College of LawFollow

Volume

11

Issue

1

Abstract

In 1995, the Internet was becoming a global phenomenon and users needed "domain names"--the street signs of Internet addresses--for an array of commercial and noncommercial speech. A small community of "multistakeholders"--business, civil society, governments, technologists, intellectual property and non-government organization representations--began to write rules for Internet addresses largely on behalf of a global population that had yet to be connected to the Internet. I had the privilege of being part of that group. Since then, Internet use has skyrocketed from 70 million users (1.7% of the world population) in 1995 to over 4.5 billion users (58.8% of the world population) today. Stunningly, today's Internet features over 250 million domain names and 1.5 billion websites.

Repository Citation

Kathryn Kleiman, Crash Goes ICANN's Multistakeholder Model, 11 American University Intellectual Property Breif (2020).
Available at: https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/facsch_lawrev/1902