Bring on the IANA Competitors

I'm not sure I quite understand what you are saying.

I absolutely agree that ICANN/IANA ought to be entirely out of the IP address allocation business.

And I see no reason why ICANN ought to have any role in the job of handlng the "IANA Considerations" parts of RFCs.

Nor do I see any reason why ICANN/IANA ought to have any role in the mechanical and clerical job of updating NS records for TLDs, all TLDs.

Nor do I see any reason why IANA needs to validate TLD zone contents beyond that which is strictly and directly necessary to ensure that the delegation linkage from the root to each TLD is well formed. (This checking, by the way does not require a zone transfer - it can be done completely and with minimal intrusion using standard DNS queries.)

ICANN's staff has said to me that it considers it appropriate for ICANN to induce a contract with ICANN as a precondition to the delivery of IANA services - such as the updating of ccTLD NS records - which is to my way of thinking a statement to the effect that ICANN is willing to sacrifice the actual operational stability of the Internet for no purpose other than to elevate ICANN.

ICANN has transformed the ability to suggest to the US Dep't of Commerce's NTIA what TLDs ought to appear in the root into a power to dictate trademark policy on a worldwide basis. That is a role that has abolutely nothing with the technical job of IANA.

IANA has been trusted. However, IANA will lose (if it has not already lost) that trust because it is being used as a hammer to shape ICANN's non-technical institutional and political agendas.

The choice of who gets the nod to operate a ccTLD ought to be based on objective principles objectively applied. The choice ought not to be colored, cheapened, and discredited by bureaucrats who stand to benefit if they can use that IANA power to get one of the candidates to sign a contract with ICANN.

The answer that is obvious to me, if not to the US Dept of Commerce, is that ICANN should not have any institutional linkage to the IANA mechanisms used to who gets to operate each ccTLD. In other words, the present practice of having commingled staff, comingled offices, comingled finances, and comaingled goals must be ended. With regard to ccTLD matters, ICANN and IANA should be divorced.

ICANN and IANA have been so comingled that it is impossible to ascertain who of ICANN's staff makes what IANA decision, who of ICANN's staff has been involved in each IANA decision, or how much time or money ICANN's staff has spent wearing IANA hats. ICANN is making a gift to the US government by providing these services for no charge, that gift may or may not be appropriate, but no one can tell how much that gift costs.

That leaves the issue of those TLDs that are not ccTLDs and not for administrative purposes (the latter including, for instance, in-addr.arpa).

The answer to that question is the hardest, but the guideline we ought to follow is this: The IANA role should be insulated from politics and should be structured to deal only with those questions that a) directly concern the ability of the Internet to reliably, accurately, and swiftly deliver packets from a source IP address to a destination IP address and b) directly concern the ability of the DNS roots and TLDs to reliably, accurately, and swiftly process DNS transactions.

Issues, such as the degree to which the domain name system is to be made the handmaiden of the trademark industry are not matters that ought to be allowed to intrude on the delivery of IANA services.

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Re:There are many parts of IANA by KarlAuerbach

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