ICANN's IANA Transition Coordination Group Releases Combined Proposal

The combined proposal meets the NTIA’s goal of supporting multistakeholder Internet governance because it “leverages existing multistakeholder arrangements, processes, and paradigms in defining the post-transition IANA oversight and accountability mechanisms,” ICG said. “Each component of the proposal has this feature.” Neither the CRISP Team proposal nor the IETF IANAPLAN working group proposal “suggest[s] changes that could affect the security, stability, or resiliency” of the Domain Name System, ICG said. The combined proposal would ensure that the post-transition IANA administrator would “provide the IANA functions to its global customers and partners post-transition in essentially the same manner as ICANN’s IANA department does today,” ICG said. The combined proposal requires that IANA entities and functions remain as accessible post-transition as they are at present, and “does not replace NTIA’s role with a government or inter-governmental organization,” ICG said. NTIA is “pleased to see the community’s proposal is now available for final public comment and thank[s] the group for its hard work,” a spokeswoman said. “We encourage stakeholders to review and comment on the proposal.”

The three community proposals are largely compatible and interoperable, “containing appropriate and properly supported independent accountability mechanisms for running the IANA function, relying mostly on the right of each operational community to select a new entity for the performance of the IANA function,” ICG said. The three proposals are “workable” despite varying slightly based on each community’s priorities, since each “indicated future ability to change the IANA functions operator, but have established requirements to help ensure that any such future changes will not result in operational disruptions,” ICG said. Only the CRISP Team proposal addresses ownership of IANA-related intellectual property like trademarks and the iana.org domain name, ICG said. The CRISP Team proposed that the IETF Trust or another entity independent of an IANA functions provider retain the iana.org domain name and IANA trademarks. As long as CWG-Stewardship and the IETF IANAPLAN working group can “accommodate the specified requirements as part of their implementation, then the implementation of the proposals will be compatible,” ICG said.

The ICG report indicates further revisions to the IANA transition plan are likely to be fairly minimal apart from accountability measures suggested by the CCWG-Accountability since the ICG has identified only a few areas where inconsistencies among the three community transition proposals don’t mesh, said Domain Name Association Executive Director Kurt Pritz in an interview. “This work is already fairly advanced, so what I foresee is a fairly smooth process going forward,” he said. Most public comments on the ICG’s combined proposal are likely to be supportive of the plan, so that’s unlikely to result in any significant delays to ICG’s revisions, Pritz said. Public comments on the ICG proposal are due Sept. 8, ICANN said. The ICG is expected to submit a final version of the IANA transition proposal for approval at ICANN’s Oct. 18-22 meeting in Dublin so ICANN can submit that proposal to NTIA for further evaluation by early November (see 1507080044).

CCWG-Accountability is set to release a revised draft of its ICANN accountability proposal Monday, which should reveal whether the group has moved closer to a consensus on how to enforce the proposal’s new ICANN community powers, said John Laprise, an Internet governance scholar and consultant. CCWG-Accountability’s proposal would include giving the ICANN community the power to veto an ICANN budget passed by the nonprofit’s board and the power to recall some or all of that board’s members. CCWG-Accountability was unable to reach a consensus at ICANN 53 on whether to allow ICANN community members to enforce new powers via an arbitrator or a court proceeding (see 1507160058).