Report by GAO Critical of ICANN

The company that administers the system that approves Internet addresses is too secretive, too slow to plug security holes and too loosely regulated, investigators concluded in a report to be presented to a congressional panel today.

The Senate Commerce subcommittee on science, technology and space will hear testimony from critics and the Internet Corp. for Assigned Names and Numbers.

Critics said ICANN, based in Marina del Rey, has not moved quickly 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 panel.

The report, obtained Tuesday by the Associated Press, says 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.

ICANN President Stuart Lynn, who plans to resign next year, defended his group, saying that Commerce already has “tremendous oversight” over its work. Lynn announced plans for an ICANN reorganization several months ago. The plan has not been approved yet, but it already has outraged critics because it would remove elected ICANN board members.