The IETF has written a letter to NTIA regarding the RFI for IANA services. The current contract with ICANN expires this month.
The IETF suggests “the DoC separate the technical parameter assignment function (as corrected above) from the other two functions since that is carried out for and at the direction of the IETF.” and transfer these under the IETF/ISOC umbrella. This obviously makes a lot of sense. Protocol numbering is not a hot political issue and is best kept outside the political storms.
However, if the DoC answer is negative, the other approach would be to have an unilateral decision by the IETF/IAB to end its agreement with the IANA and set up a new numbering secretariat for its own purposes.
An interesting reading is the opinion of the US General Accounting Office: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/og00033r.pdf . This is already six years old, but still very meaningful.
Some excerpts:
“It is unclear whether the Department has the authority to transfer control of the authoritative root server to ICANN. [...] it is unclear if the Department has the requisite authority to effect such a transfer.”
“The delegation from an agency to a private party is sometimes referred to as the doctrine of subdelegation, with the original delegation between Congress and the agency. [...] Here, Congress has never delegated responsibility to manage the domain name system to any federal agency.”
The above sentences applied to the root zone file editing process. We should see if it also applies to the IANA functions. As we know, the DoC never took this into consideration and continued its process of contracting with ICANN and Verisign. But at least, they know their position and authority could be legally challenged.
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