ICANN Stakeholders Urge Further Clarification of Draft IANA Transition Proposal

The ICANN board and others urged ICG to clarify the relationship between the proposed Post-Transition IANA (PTI) and ICANN since the proposal would make them legally separate entities. The Generic Names Supporting Organization’s (GNSO) Business Constituency (BC) said it’s among the entities supporting a legally separate PTI, but said PTI should have a “limited remit” and should have clear accountability to the ICANN board. Members of the proposed PTI board “should be drawn from the broader ICANN board, rather than including three employees of ICANN or PTI and two independent directors,” the BC said. GNSO’s IP Constituency urged ICG to address the “significant gap” in proposed oversight of PTI actions “affecting the root zone relating to ccTLD root zone actions, in particular delegations/redelegations.”

It "would be prudent to provide additional safeguards to ensure PTI remains accountable to the broader multistakeholder community” clarify the relationship between PTI and the numbers and protocol parameters communities, Google said. ICG should limit PTI’s power and make it more accountable to ICANN, Microsoft said. “It is of paramount importance that the accountability mechanisms and review organisms planned for the PTI should include further details on their constitution, funding, performance and transparency,” Access said. PTI and other new entities created in the draft IANA transition proposal “are new but we do not see these as raising concerns -- they will however require measured implementation and monitoring,” the Center for Democracy and Technology said.

The ICANN board and others raised concerns about how the ICG proposal would address a future split of the IANA functions among multiple entities. The draft proposal “lacks detail on the process that each operational community will use to determine the escalation paths leading to separability, ensuring accountability of a successor, and identifying a successor” IANA functions operator, the board said. The CWG-Stewardship proposal provided a potential framework that could be useful for the numbers and protocol parameters communities, the board said. A potential future split of the IANA functions among more than one entity “will likely introduce instability,” the At-Large Advisory Committee (ALAC) said. A measure to increase direct operational coordination between the names, numbers and protocol parameters communities would “reduce and/or prevent the likelihood of a split,” ALAC said. Any IANA functions split should be discussed among all ICANN communities, ALAC said. BC said it “supports the principle of severability of the IANA functions, and we are not necessarily opposed to a future in which the three functions are performed separately. We do note, however, that the latter is a subject that has not been explicitly agreed upon by the community.”

The final IANA transition proposal should include a “substantive standard” for separation, BC said. That standard could “specify that separation can only take place if the IANA Functions Review team finds that keeping the functions with the current operator raises significant concerns regarding the security, stability, and resiliency of the functions and the security, stability, and resiliency of the domain name system overall,” BC said. Google separately supported a separation standard, in which a “Separation Cross Community Working Group” would be required to make a “clear finding that keeping the functions with the current IFO poses a substantial threat to the security, stability, and resiliency of the functions and of the DNS as a whole.” The GNSO and Country Code Names Supporting Organization should be required to approve any separation, Google said.

The European Commission’s Directorate General for Communication Networks, Content and Technology and Brazil’s government echoed other stakeholders in noting the importance of a finalized package of ICANN accountability changes from the Cross Community Working Group on Enhancing ICANN Accountability (CCWG-Accountability) on the ICG’s IANA transition proposal. Comments on the CCWG-Accountability’s latest draft proposal are due Saturday (see 1508040058). ICANN’s board has endorsed “key concepts” in the CCWG-Accountability proposal but is continuing to raise concerns about mechanisms for enforcing the proposal’s new ICANN community powers (see 1509030025 and 1509040035). “A successful IANA transition must be accompanied by the right checks and balances for ICANN to abide by the highest levels of accountability,” EC said. “The work currently being carried out in parallel on the improvements of ICANN accountability will be critical to the overall success of the transition.” Brazil continued to raise concerns about ensuring that the IANA transition is “structured in a way that all stakeholders feel fully involved -- including governments.” The country said “a final assessment of the ICG proposal will depend, to a large extent, on the outcome of topics being discussed under the CCWG-Accountability proposal.”