Re: [Ianaplan] Fwd: [CWG-Stewardship] ICG request concerning IANA trademark and iana.org domain name

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Monday, June 22, 2015 10:36 -0300 John R Levine
<[e-mail]> wrote:

>> If we were to put the legal questions aside, I imagine we
>> would all argue that of course the IETF should be able to
>> continue to use the name IANA no matter who the IFO was.
>> Would you agree with that statement?
> 
> Of course.  But it makes no sense to put the legal questions
> aside.  If the future IANA continues to be reasonable, which
> we all hope and expect it will, things will work fine and it
> doesn't matter who holds the trademark and domain.  If things
> get nasty, it stil doesn't matter, we're schrod no matter who
> holds the trademark and domain.

I don't know that I would go quite that far or be quite that
bleak in my predictions, but it seems to me that, if things
turned nasty:

(i) Even if we (aka the IETF Trust) held the names, if things
got nasty there could be challenges about who could use them and
for what.  The advantage I see in using the IETF Trust (or any
other neutral party with similar interests and history) is that
the IETF Trust's charter (and consistent practices) would make
the intent that the name and domain were to be used for the
benefit of the whole Internet community (and agreement to that
intent) clear (see below).

(ii) If things do get nasty enough that the use of the names
were seriously challenged, we would, as several of us have
pointed out, need to move / rename the registries as a stability
matter; we could not wait until those issues, whatever they
were, were resolved.

(iii) As Andrew pointed out, once we start moving things, it is
extremely unlikely that there would be any going back.  In
retrospect, we probably should have established
iana-protocols.org, iana-addresses.org, etc. --or at least
established clear subdomains for the three sets of registries
and used them in our terminology-- in 2002 or earlier.  Too late
now.

Even if the intent were clearly established (by an IETF Trust
agreement or otherwise [1], it does not prevent "nasty" should a
really bad situation develop.  It doesn't even prevent someone
in the names community from wondering whether, if we pulled the
protocol registries out and were suddenly stuck with the costs,
we (or IAOC or the IETF Trust) wouldn't suddenly see the names
as a revenue opportunity.  I'm confident we wouldn't do that,
both of you are probably confident we wouldn't do that, but, for
someone who is not personally familiar and involved with
whatever passes as an IETF culture, it is as reasonable a
question as our worrying about exclusive licenses and where the
trademark and domain name live seems to be to us.

best,
   john


[1] To save someone else suggesting it, one could also establish
that intent through some amount of lawyer-speak in a
hypothetical PTI charter or bylaws.   Maybe it could even be
done in a way that would be consistent with languages about
exclusive licenses.  But, given that bylaws and charters can be
changed, even that would come back to my comments about trust
several days ago.