[governance] IANA contract to be opened for competitive bidding on November 4

[Pranesh Prakash]

The applicants for the IANA contract have to be companies based in the USA.

From .Nxt : http://goo.gl/odI4k

# US government puts IANA contract out for open bidding #
by Kieren McCarthy | 21 Oct 2011 |
The United States government will put out the IANA functions contract
for competitive bidding at the start of next month.

A notice announcing the bid was [posted earlier today][] on the
FedBizOpps website, a database of federal government contracting
opportunities that contains roughly 50 percent of US government
procurements projects.

The pre-solicitation notice points to a 4 November publication date for
the official Request for Proposals, and an expected closing date one
month later. The contract will run for seven years, with an initial
three-year base period followed by two, two-year optional extension periods.

But if you were thinking of applying, you may want to note that the
contract comes with precisely $0 in federal funds. In other words you
will be running the systems for nothing. According to ICANN, it spent
$5.6 million running IANA last year, and has estimated that will
increase to $6.5 million next year.

Of course were you to win the contract, it would be in the interests of
Internet registries and Internet protocol organizations worldwide to
fund the effective management of the contract. But that would certainly
be something any business manager would need to consider.

On top of that, the IANA contract, albeit a highly technical function,
comes with significant political and legal implications, demonstrated
earlier this month when ICANN, under the name of IANA, assumed the
running of the global timezone database after the previous owner was
threatened with a lawsuit.

Then there is the fact that the holder of the IANA contract could, in
theory at least, move an entire country’s Internet to different look-up
servers - something that has caused years of international intrigue.
Some countries have very publicly railed against the fact that a US
company operating under a US government contract is nominally in charge
of whether their national top-level domain is available on the Internet.

Since the contract specifies that the contract holder be a company based
in the United States, that issue is not likely to disappear any time soon.

## Review process ##

The IANA contract covers a range of critical Internet functions, most
notably managing the domain name system address book (the root zone
file), and has been awarded to ICANN since February 2000.

Earlier this year, ICANN officially requested that the US government use
the end of the current contract (30 September) to adjust the contract
terms to effectively make it a cooperative agreement between it and the
government. That request was rejected by the National Telecommunication
and Information Administration (NTIA) which said only Congress had the
power to change the make-up of the contract.

Then, in an unusual move that Assistant Commerce Secretary Larry
Strickling publicly stated was in order to force ICANN to live up to its
accountability and transparency obligations, the US government stated
that it was going to open up the contract.

First it announced through a formal [Notice of Inquiry][] in February
that it was going to review the IANA contract, providing a series of
questions that it asked people to respond to. Then, it produced a draft
Request for Proposals (RFP) inside a “Further Notice of Inquiry” (FNOI)
which it [published in June][], and again asked for public feedback. In
order to have time to consider all the comments, the NTIA provided a
temporary extension to ICANN’s contract until 31 March 2012.

The FNOI received no less than 46 responses (which we have summarized
and broken out both [by topic][] and [by sender][]).

Despite all these steps, and a number of clear public statements by
Strickling, attendees to the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Nairobi
last month were still surprised when the NTIA made clear its intent was
to launch an open bidding process for the contract.

## Breakdown of trust ##

While it refuses to acknowledge the fact, ICANN brought the open bidding
of an IANA contract that is crucial to its authority on itself.

When the US government agreed to much greater autonomy for the
organization in September 2009, moving from a “Joint Project Agreement”
to an “Affirmation of Commitments”, the key element of the new agreement
was an independent review into ICANN’s accountability and transparency.
On the review team was no less than NTIA Secretary Strickling.

Unfortunately, ICANN demonstrated the very behavior that had sparked
calls for the review in the first place, interfering with the review at
both the staff and Board level, leading to several public and private
arguments between the review team and ICANN’s CEO and Chairman. The
final report included an entire appendix outlining ICANN’s failure of
objectivity and an “attitude of inordinate defensiveness and distrust”.

That disaster was swiftly followed by a collapse in relations between
the ICANN Board and the Governmental Advisory Committee (GAC) over both
the dot-xxx top-level domain and the rules for new Internet extensions.

A series of increasingly difficult public meetings, which at times
verged on the surreal, led to the ICANN Board approving the dot-xxx
extension despite a very strongly worded statement against it by
governments, and the “approval” of the Applicant Guidebook after
begrudging acceptance of a large number of suggested changes put forward
by the GAC.

It was then, at a time when relations between the US government and
ICANN had never been lower, that both the Chairman and CEO used public
speeches to request that the US government to hand over to it the one
contract that gives the NTIA some measure of influence over the
organization. To nobody’s surprise but ICANN, the NTIA said no.

## Delusional ##

The strong likelihood is that ICANN will retain the IANA contract given
its experience with running the technical functions, the cost of running
the contract, and the political implications in changing ownership.

However the NTIA will be hoping that by putting the [contract][posted
earlier today] out to an open bid that it will shake ICANN’s
almost-delusional belief that it has a god-given right to the contract.

One thing that the public comment period the NTIA held on the contract
made clear was that the Internet community was not that impressed with
the way ICANN actually ran the IANA contract. It was lacking in customer
service, provided poor explanations, was lacking in clear and verifiable
policies, and it had not improved its services in years, nor come good
on promises for improvements.

It is difficult to see another organization step in and run the IANA
contract, and many will not favor a shift due to the uncertainty it may
cause. But in the bigger scheme of things, it may be good for both ICANN
and the Internet if the organization was given a serious run for its
money during the open bidding, and so forced to justify its continued
ownership of a crucial Internet function.

  [posted earlier today]:
http://news.dot-nxt.com/2011/10/21/iana-contract-notice-fedopsbiz
  [Notice of Inquiry]: http://news.dot-nxt.com/2011/02/25/usg-iana-noi
  [published in June]: http://news.dot-nxt.com/2011/06/10/ntia-fnoi-iana
  [by topic]: http://news.dot-nxt.com/2011/08/15/iana-fnoi-summary-responses
  [by sender]:
http://news.dot-nxt.com/2011/08/15/iana-fnoi-summary-by-sender

-- 
Pranesh Prakash
Programme Manager
Centre for Internet and Society
W: http://cis-india.org | T: +91 80 40926283

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