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

Sun Oct 23 01:13:02 EDT 2011

I wonder if this could be seen as more of a message by the US government to
CS ("Don't forget who's actually in charge!") than as a message from the US
gov. to ICANN...
Best,
Ivar

On Sun, Oct 23, 2011 at 00:55, Pranesh Prakash <pranesh at cis-india.org>wrote:

> 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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