FW: Comments of the Internet Governance Project on IANA contract

[Milton L Mueller]

> 
> Comments of the Internet Governance Project on the NTIA's "Request for
> Comments on the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) Functions"
> 
> This submission is from the Internet Governance Project (IGP), an
> alliance of academics doing research and policy analysis in the fields
> of global governance, Internet policy, and information and communication
> technology. http://blog.internetgovernance.org
> 
> For better or worse, the IANA contract is perceived as one of the
> linchpins of global internet governance. For that reason, our comments
> begin by assessing the role of the IANA contract in the overall Internet
> governance regime.
> 
> At the highest level, there are three alternative approaches to the
> future of the IANA function.
> 1. One is to continue with the status quo, which involves the U.S.
> government exercising unilateral control over the nature of the
> functions embodied in the agreement and choosing the contractor.
> 2. The second approach, which is desired by many governments around the
> world, is to multi-lateralize the contracting process. The U.S. would
> share its authority over the IANA function with other governments,
> either on a one-country, one-vote basis or through some subset or club
> of privileged governments.
> 3. The third approach is to de-nationalize the IANA function. This means
> fully delegating the IANA functions to nongovernmental actors in the
> private sector and civil society, and eventually eliminating the U.S.
> government's direct authority over it.
> 
> The first two options have numerous pitfalls. Unilateral U.S. control of
> the IANA contract disenfranchises most of the world's Internet users,
> and is a thorn in the side of many other governments, including friendly
> ones such as the European Union. The U.S. government's role leads
> inevitably to a demand by other governments for equal status and draws
> Internet coordination processes into inter-state rivalries, adding an
> unduly political dimension to activities that should be driven by
> coordination, efficiency, technical expertise and a concern for global
> interoperability and the interests of all users. But making the
> contracting process multilateral and intergovernmental makes a bad
> situation worse. The involvement of multiple nation-states in basic
> internet coordination processes would make IANA a plaything of
> geopolitics and drastically increase the complexity and difficulty of
> its tasks.
> 
> The third approach - de-nationalization - is the best. Denationalization
> was in fact the original objective of the process that created ICANN. It
> is worthwhile to reiterate the reason why. It was understood at the time
> that the Internet needed a truly globalized regime for governing the
> coordination processes and policies associated with Internet
> identifiers. Territorial governments insistent upon their sovereign
> powers were perceived as inherently incapable of delivering that kind of
> globalized compatibility and coordination. This problem, it was thought
> in 1997-98, could be avoided through reliance on private sector
> organizations rooted in the Internet technical community, operating on
> the basis of transnationally applicable contracts and agreements.
> 
> Denationalization, however, requires that the private sector
> institutions that inherit the governance responsibilities be
> responsible, accountable and stable. Thus while we agree with ICANN's
> comments that the IANA contract's ultimate aim should be devolution to a
> private actor, we do not agree with the implication that ICANN as it
> currently exists should be the presumptive recipient of all the IANA
> functions. Part of the reason is the imperfection and lack of maturity
> of ICANN's accountability arrangements. A more important reason,
> however, is that ICANN currently combines too many functions in a single
> organization. Currently, ICANN performs both operational and policy
> making functions (e.g., running the L root), and the IANA contract
> unnecessarily concentrates multiple functions in the hands of a single
> entity. We do not think it advisable to privatize all those functions in
> a single corporation's hands, especially given the weakness of its
> accountability arrangements. We see an unbundling of the IANA functions
> as a way to minimize any risks and dangers that might be associated with
> de-nationalization. The unbundling must take place first, full de-
> nationalization second.
> 
> We believe therefore that NTIA should use the next cycle of the IANA
> contract to prepare the way for unbundling the protocol parameters, IP
> address resources and DNS root zone coordination functions, aiming for
> the eventual delegation of those separated functions to appropriately
> accountable non-state actors, such as the IETF for protocol parameters.
> We recommend that this happen expeditiously, but not too hastily - e.g.,
> over a three-year time span.
> 
> With that preamble, we now address the first two questions in the RFC:
> 
> Q1: There is no technical or economic imperative that requires combining
> domain name, IP address and protocol parameter coordination in a single
> entity. IGP supports the comments of Internet NZ and Bill Manning
> regarding the feasibility and desirability of separating the distinct
> IANA functions. Structural separation is not only technically feasible,
> it has good governance and accountability implications. By
> decentralizing the functions we undermine the possibility of capture by
> governmental or private interests and make it more likely that policy
> implementations are based on consensus and cooperation.
> 
> Q2: This is not a simple question. In general, we believe that the IANA
> contract should avoid rigid, formalized specifications of the roles of
> specific actors. A U.S. government IANA contract is supposed to be a
> transitional device on the road to full denationalization. An IANA
> contract that names specific entities such as ICANN, the RIRs, IETF and
> ccTLD operators, and then legally requires them to fulfill certain
> responsibilities with respect to each other, starts to take on the
> characteristics of a constitution of cyberspace, one that makes the NTIA
> its perpetual legislator and Supreme Court. We think that is not
> desirable. On the other hand, we agree with Internet NZ that a well-
> drafted set of IANA contracts would "clearly state, for each registry,
> the entity that determines policy for that registry and contain clear
> instructions that the operator must follow the policy set out by that
> entity and not create any policy of its own." Ideally there would be
> separate contracts for each IANA function, and thus no contract would
> need to reference any entity other than the registry and the policy
> making entity for that registry.
> 
> 
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