Year: 2011

Alternative address trading platforms are gaining traction. The Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) are worried. Paul Vixie, the Chair of ARIN's Board, has written an article in ACM Queue attacking “those who would unilaterally supplant or redraw the existing Internet resource governance or allocation systems.” The publication of this article is a sign of a growing policy debate around the reform of IP address registries in the age of IPv4 exhaustion. Unfortunately, Vixie's arguments show that he is disconnected from the economic and institutional realities of the IPv4 address regime.

Read the comments of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) in the IANA Further Notice of Inquiry. There you will find the answer to the mystery of Section C.2.2.1.3.2. What's that, you ask? Section C.2.2.1.3.2 is a bizarre, out of the blue change to the IANA Statement of Work proposed by the U.S. Commerce Department's NTIA. It contains a call for IANA to decide whether new gTLDs that have already been approved by ICANN have “consensus support” and are “in the public interest.” The proposed change is ridiculous because the IANA is supposed to be a largely mechanical process of entering unique strings into the DNS root. IGP has been in the forefront of explaining what a disaster C.2.2.1.3.2 would be. Every organization that has bothered to notice it has also opposed it in the public comments. So now we know where it came from: the trademark lobby, of course.

IGP filed comments on the Commerce Department's Further Notice of Inquiry on the IANA functions contract today. Our comments noted that there are elements in the proposed new IANA Statement of Work (SOW) which could radically alter the nature of the IANA functions contract.