[governance] NTIA announcement on JPA

[John Levine]

This all seems rather pointless to me.  The only people whose opinions
about ICANN matter are the root server operators and the RIRs.

A short review of the roots will reveal that three of them, E, G, and
H, are operated by agencies of the US government, two, B and D by
universities with extensive government contracts, and two of them, A
and J, by Verisign who for obvious reasons isn't going to do anything
to gratuitously annoy the USG.  Could you tell us about your strategy
to persuade them to do what you want what than what the USG wants?

ICANN does an adequate job of running IANA and the ccTLDs, with no
political interference.  If any US administration were going to try to
turn off .CU and .IR it would have been this one, but they didn't.

ICANN's bureaucratic constipation makes it unable to add any
interesting new TLDs, but in the real world nobody cares, they all use
either .COM or their local ccTLD and would do so even if they had a
thousand funky new TLDs to choose from.

IANA does OK allocating /8's to the RIRs, and nobody's ever offered an
alternative that wouldn't be much worse. (Recall grumblings a year or
two ago from tiny countries that wanted all countries to get the same
number of IP addresses.)

How could it possibly be to their benefit to side with a "rogue" ICANN
vs the USG?  Get real.

R's,
John



>Well here s a few thoughts to get the ball rolling
>
>1. Sign another parallel (for a short time) agreement with an international
>body eg UN (maybe via IGF) for a similar oversight function
>2. Relocate HQ to another country
>3. Raise with its constituencies and actively promote an argument to be
>declared an international organisation
>4. Gradually and subtly transfer its powers to a related organisation that
>is international and then gradually drop the old one.
>5. Give some thought to the matter for a start
>6. Believe that independence from USG oversight really is fundamental to
>gaining international credibility and legitimacy
>7. Believe that it is important to do something
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