[governance] European Commission 'welcomes improvements in new IANA contract'

[Daniel Kalchev]

On Nov 14, 2011, at 3:41 PM, Roland Perry wrote:

> In message <4EC11941.70705 at cis-india.org>, at 19:06:01 on Mon, 14 Nov 2011, Pranesh Prakash <pranesh at cis-india.org> quote Neelie Kroes:
> 
>> The Commission has long maintained that a strict conflict of interest
>> policy will markedly improve the quality of the decision-making
>> processes of the next IANA contractor.
> 
> I wonder which IANA decisions those are? They make remarkably few, As ICANN put it in a letter to the Department of Commerce in July: "The IANA staff does not develop policies, lead policy development processes, or make policy decisions in the course of performing the IANA functions."
> 
> Even cctld redelegations are decided upon by the ICANN board.

Everyone would have benefited if IANA behavior remained as originally designed and implemented, before ICANN was introduced in the game.

The IANA guidelines, spelled in RFC1591 clearly state that IANA does not participate in "re-delegation".  In fact, it does not even lave such word (re-delegation) in there! That terminology was later designed by the "commissioner" types..

> 
>> Furthermore, following Commission demands, the draft contract states
>> that when introducing new Top-Level Domains (such as dot.museum or
>> dot.movie), or modifying existing ones, the next IANA contractor will
>> have to provide specific documentation demonstrating how the underlying
>> decision-making process was supportive of the public interest.
> 
> Their own decision-making, or that of ICANN?


Unfortunately, this situation indicates two things:

- The USG has lost it's trust in the ICANN "process".

- The USG is apparently convinced that others too, have lost their trust in the ICANN process.

The development of this "safeguards" looks to me as a way for the USG to make sure ICANN will stop misbehaving, by eventually pulling all responsibility for the root zone management away from ICANN.

It will be very interesting to observe how ICANN complies with this requirement, if it wins the bid.

Daniel____________________________________________________________
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