Revised IANA Transition an Improvement but More Information Is Needed, Stakeholders Say
The ICANN Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) stewardship cross-community working group’s (CWG-Stewardship) revised proposal for an IANA transition plan is an improvement over CWG-Stewardship’s original proposal, but several portions require additional work, industry stakeholders told us. The revised plan, released last week, recommends ICANN create a legally separate subsidiary, called the Post-Transition IANA (PTI), to handle the IANA transition. An ICANN-selected board would govern PTI, while the Customer Standing Committee and the IANA Function Review Team (IFRT) would handle current federal oversight functions, CWG-Stewardship said in the proposal. The IFRT could propose completely separating PTI from ICANN under extraordinary circumstances, the revised proposal said (see 1504270053). Stakeholders had said CWG-Stewardship’s earlier proposal was too bureaucratic and lacked sufficient clarity (see 1412240048).
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Timely, relevant coverage of court proceedings and agency rulings involving tariffs, classification, valuation, origin and antidumping and countervailing duties. Each day, Trade Law Daily subscribers receive a daily headline email, in-depth PDF edition and access to all relevant documents via our trade law source document library and website.
The CWG-Stewardship’s revised proposal is “moving in the right direction,” but it’s difficult to fully assess because the proposal marks two sections as “under development,” making the document more of a “work in progress” than a full-fledged proposal, said Internet Commerce Association Counsel Philip Corwin. Sections outlining how PTI would be structured and how current oversight functions would be fulfilled post-transition are highly dependent on the forthcoming release of a separate CWG’s draft proposal on ICANN accountability, the CWG-Stewardship proposal said. The ICANN accountability proposal is to be released soon, but it would have been helpful for the two CWGs to release their proposals as a complete package, Corwin said.
The IANA transition and ICANN accountability proposals are “very interdependent now” because the revised CWG-Stewardship proposal deals with an ICANN affiliate rather than a completely separate entity, said Syracuse University professor Milton Mueller. “That means there’ll have to be bylaw adjustments via the accountability process to make sure ICANN can’t mess up this independence and to ensure there is an independent review function for the IANA operator,” he said. Legal advisers have “identified very clearly come of the things that the accountability working group has to do to fully implement what [CWG-Stewardship] is proposing,” Mueller said.
Mueller said he believes criticism of the earlier CWG-Stewardship proposal as being too bureaucratic was largely unfounded, saying much of the criticism came from stakeholders who didn’t want to completely lose ICANN’s influence over the IANA functions. The revised proposal provides a “middle ground” in which PTI is still nominally part of ICANN but is a legally separate entity, Mueller said. “We’re not throwing it out there on its own,” he said. “That’s the only way we can get consensus going forward, by making it legally separate while also allaying the worries of people who are worried about externalizing the IANA functions by keeping it in the ICANN family.”
ICANN should hold a second comment period on the revised IANA transition proposal once a more “complete” proposal is available after the release of the ICANN accountability proposal, Corwin said. ICANN allowed for a 28-day comment period on the CWG-Stewardship revised proposal, which is significantly shorter than the typical 40-day period that’s standard for ICANN proceedings and is “insufficient” for stakeholders to provide meaningful comments, Corwin said. “I know they’re aiming to deliver this to the IANA Coordination Group in mid-June, which is six months behind the original target date, but we keep hearing that [Sept. 30, the date that ICANN’s current contract with NTIA ends] is more of a goal than a deadline,” Corwin said. ICANN "didn't set this public comment timeline," a spokesman said. "We are supporting the work of the CWG as directed by its co-chairs."
NTIA Administrator Larry Strickling didn’t comment Tuesday on the revised CWG-Stewardship proposal during a speech at an Internet2 event. He acknowledged it’s “becoming increasingly clear” that the transition process would go beyond Sept. 30. Strickling said NTIA would work with stakeholders on a possible extension of ICANN’s current contract to allow more time to complete transition plans.