1.2.1 Early Commitments to the Internet "Public"

While responsible management of the Internet's addressing, naming, and protocol resources are of clear international concern, the history of ICANN's development as an organization was largely the result of negotiation with the American government. In 1998, partly spurred by recent international efforts to promote globally responsive naming and addressing administration, the U.S. Department of Commerce (Commerce) released two policy documents calling for the creation of the corporate entity that eventually became ICANN. Known as the Green and White Papers, these documents provided an early conceptual sketch of the founding principles, authorities and responsibilities, and proposed organizational structure on which ICANN would be built.

"Representation" was one of the four founding principles that these documents laid out for ICANN. As the White Paper, put it:

The development of sound, fair, and widely accepted policies for the management of DNS will depend on input from the broad and growing community of Internet users. Management structures should reflect the functional and geographic diversity of the Internet and its users. Mechanisms should be established to ensure international participation in decision-making.

In imagining a governance structure for ICANN that would serve this principle, the Green Paper suggested a Board of Directors that would balance-in a roughly even way-the interests of specific domain name and IP number stakeholders with those of commercial, noncommercial, and individual Internet "users." But the White Paper did not provide a specific blueprint for how the Board would be constituted or created, as the prescriptive and detailed nature of the Green Paper's recommendations had been widely and heavily criticized. The White Paper suggested that "commercial, not-for-profit, and individual" users were all likely participants and the Department of Commerce invited Internet stakeholders from around the world to work together to form the new entity.

In response to the call by the White Paper, an ad hoc group of Internet business, technical interests, and representatives from the user community known as the International Forum on the White Paper (IFWP) was established to seek consensus among all the major stakeholders about the group that would eventually become ICANN.

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