On Fri, 25 Jun 2004, JFC (Jefsey) Morfin wrote:
My understanding was that IANA is a neutral, independent, technical authority
"the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is a function performed by ICANN".
There is a significant lack of clarity in these matters.
ICANN has a number of legal arrangements with the US Dept of Commerce and its subagencies. The most relevant to IANA is a sole-source purchase order that comes from the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration (a sub-agency of the DoC) under which NOAA is purchasing an essentially undefined thing called the IANA function and ICANN is providing that thing for zero dollars.
Usually in a purchase order the flow of deliverables runs towards the purchasor. In this case nothing particularly tangible flows towards the NOAA, but there does seem to be a rather cloudy delegation of authority from NOAA to ICANN. In addition there is the oft-asked and never answered question of whether NOAA (or NTIA, another sub-agency of the Dept of Commerce) has such authority to delegate in the first place. (The GAO did examine that question and found the authority to be lacking.)
In any event, what commeth via purchase order can goeth via the lapse of that purchase order. Unless there is some unwritten accord, ICANN has no guarantee that it will continue to be able to act as the uncompeted, sole-source provider of the IANA function.
The IANA function as practiced by ICANN appears to have at several distinct parts:
1) The operation of the L root server. I have never heard one bad word about ICANN's performance with respect to the L server As far as I can tell, the hands on those knobs are very competent.
2) The assignment and recordation of "protocol numbers". This is the classical Numbers Czar function. Again, this seems to be competently handled, although I have heard complaints that processing of number assignments is taking too long. And I have had my own concern that this function is really something that more properly belongs under the IETF's umbrella.
3) ccTLD assignment authority. This is the controversial function. This is a job that requires IANA to decide who gets to act as the internet presence of each sovereign nation (that is, each sovereign nation except the US - US dealt with the .us TLD outside of ICANN and despite ICANN.)
Yes, there are competing theories of whether a ccTLD is a direct aspect of sovreignty or is merely a database key that happens to be isomorphic with, but not dependent upon, the existance of soverign states. My own sense is that the latter theory is not flying well among the collective governments of the world.
ICANN does not keep time cards, or at least it didn't when I last checked. And there is a great intermingling of tasks among the ICANN/IANA staff. These two aspects combine to make it very difficult to assign a quantitiative cost or level-of-effort number to IANA as a whole and much less to the distinct IANA tasks.
However, by observation it appears that the bulk of the cost, and trouble, of IANA is in item #3.
I have had concern that ICANN, or rather IANA, is being used as a pawn by political factions in a number of countries. ICANN's redelegations are often based on fairly thin bodies of evidence and are supported often by some rather questionable assertions (e.g. a letter relinquishing a ccTLD that was on an otherwise blank sheet of paper without letterhead and over the unverified signature of someone claiming to be the long lost contact.)
During my term I never felt that ICANN or IANA had the staff expertise to be able to swim in those shark infested waters. However, my sense is that with the advent of current president and other staff changes that ICANN, oops, IANA, is perhaps better equipped for this now than it was 18 months ago. But the question is still present: Might not the question of who is the most rightful operator of a ccTLD be better handled by existing organizations that are much more sophisticated in matters pertaining to who is the rightful sovereign power of a nation?
--karl--
_______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf