ICANN wants an IANA functions monopoly – will it wreck the transition process to get it?

At the ARIN meeting April 14, I was stunned by a presentation made by the Consolidated RIR IANA Stewardship Proposal (CRISP) Team. The CRISP team is composed of representatives drawn from the five regional Internet address registries. Everyone thought the process of developing an acceptable IANA transition proposal for numbers...

The design flaw in current Internet governance arrangements

The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) released an important document this month. It deserves more attention than it is getting because its message bears directly on the IANA transition. The document, “Principles for the Operation of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Registries,” has entered the IETF record as RFC 7500....

The economic case for vertical separation of IANA

As we have detailed elsewhere, in developing an IANA transition proposal the names community working group (CWG) settled into two camps, the internalists and the externalists.  A brief recap: The “externalists” proposed a model which largely reflected the current arrangement between NTIA and ICANN. It proposed replacing the NTIA with...

Questions the US Congress should ask in its IANA transition hearing

On February 25 the Senate Commerce committee will be holding hearings related to ICANN. For Congress, the hearings will be a progress report on the IANA transition and the ICANN accountability process. Testimony will come from the Assistant Secretary of Commerce Larry Strickling, ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade, and business lobbyist...

The last third: Why the IANA transition for names is hard

It is asserted that ICANN was “purpose-built” to operate the IANA functions. This is only partly true. ICANN's original design, in which the IANA functions were a central aspect, was abandoned very quickly between 1999 and 2002. ICANN‘s first bylaws tried to create three Supporting Organizations, one for domains (DNSO),...

Two-thirds done: The IANA transition in Singapore

The Singapore ICANN meeting (ICANN #52) is an inflection point in the IANA stewardship transition. The numbers and protocols processes have proceeded relatively smoothly, though not without minor hiccups, and reasonable proposals have been developed and are being reviewed. The names process, predictably, is taking longer. On the whole, the...