Re: [Ianaplan] it's more than that

[John Curran <[e-mail]>]

On May 3, 2015, at 5:41 PM, John Levine <[e-mail]<mailto:[e-mail]>> wrote:
...
Personally, I'm more concerned about two things.  One is that the
CWG's plan boils down to ICANN overseeing itself through a wholly
owned subsidiary.  I realize there are supposed to be all sorts of
conditions indented to make this less absurd, but it seems absurd to
me.

John -

A very reasonable concern…  We’ve got a fairly difficult situation with respect to the names
community, in that ICANN is serving as their structure for organizing their community voice,
it’s their policy development structure, their oversight structure, and finally their IANA names
registry supplier.    (Wasn’t meant to be this way - DNSO community was to be a distinct
community-based organization from ICANN [much like RIRs/ASO],  develop their own policy,
and be sufficiently finically independent that it was actually ICANN that was to receive its
funding support from them…   instead, we’ve got a bit of vertical integration where it was
never originally intended.)

In any case, the act of extracting “the DNS community” from ICANN would be enormous,
so they went the other direction - move out the IANA and then work over ICANN’s structure
and accountability mechanisms so that they can have faith that ICANN truly represents the
DNS community.  There’s a just a few issues with that approach, but they’re working very
hard to make it happen.

More of an issue is the situation described in this article by the
generally perceptive Kieren McCarthy two days ago.  It reports that
ICANN has told the RIRs that ICANN won't even discuss any plan unless
it says that ICANN runs IANA forever:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/01/icann_iana_latest/

If ICANN is really saying take it or leave it, I don't see that we
and the RIRs have any option but to leave it.  That would be a huge
hassle, but given ICANN's history, does anyone dare to give them
what is in effect a blank check?

I see zero chance of that happening - the plan components developed by both the IETF
community and numbers community (i.e. IANAplan and CRISP team proposals) contain
specific termination provisions, and I wouldn’t expect that either IETF or RIR leadership
would dare depart from those blueprints in such a fundamental way. To that end, I’ll note
that the RIR CEO’s just put out a statement regarding of the most recent meetings this
weekend, and it specifically notes -

      "In accordance with the NTIA’s expectations, and with the fundamental ethic of bottom-up,
       open and inclusive governance processes, it is important to reaffirm our common commitment
       to preserve the will of the community in the administration of number resources.”
<https://www.nro.net/news/nro-statement-on-the-internet-coordination-meeting-in-london-uk-may-2015>

FYI,
/John

John Curran
President and CEO
ARIN