The IETF on the RFI for IANA services
8 March 2006 | Published in Internet, Internet Engineering Task Force, Internet Society | 1 Comment
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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9 March 2006 at 8:57 (#)
Update: one kind reader pointed out that the IAB does not say that the function should be moved under the IETF/ISOC umbrella, which is right. It does say however that “[...]the IETF established the IETF Administrative Support Activity housed within the Internet Society (ISOC) [...] The IASA is the home of all IETF-related operational agreements [...] including the IETF technical parameter assignment function”, which is a polite way to say that this part is under the responsibility of the IETF and that the DoC does not have to include that part in the RFI process.
The third paragraph still holds true, however. The DoC has repeatedly overplayed its role in the past and it is not sure it will listen to the IETF this time.
Additionally, I would consider that what applies to the procotol assignment function would apply mutatis mutandis to the IP address allocation and domain name system functions as well, as they also were also subcontracted by the IETF to the IANA.
Which means in short that ICANN should have a contract with the IETF for the IANA and root zone file editing functions, not with the DoC.