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

[John Curran]

On Oct 24, 2011, at 3:22 PM, Norbert Bollow wrote:

> According to RFC 2850 (published in the year 2000), the ICANN's IANA
> department is acting "as IANA on behalf of the IETF", and its
> appointment to this role was approved by IAB.

Specifically, the IAB believes that it has the ability to 
direct the IANA's range of action, as specifically stated 
in their second IANA NOI response, which notes "... IANA's 
actions are constrained by the technical boundary conditions 
as set by the IETF."

> I understand this as implying that in the year 2000, the US Government
> was not opposed that that perspective on IANA.

I'm uncertain how the publication of RFC 2850 implies
anything with respect to USG position at the time. It
was well known at the time that both IAB and USG made
various claims regarding authority to direct the IANA;
the entire purpose of RFC 2860 was to delineate these
authorities, in particular with respect to identifiers 
with policy implications.

> Now the US Government apparantly believes to have the authority to
> unilaterally decide who performs the IANA function.

And this is unchanged from the first IANA contract issuance 
by DoC.  We can all stare at the announcement until we start
seeing things, but as far I can tell there's a distinct lack 
of evidence of any policy change at this time.

> This looks to me like the US Government taking back authority that it
> had previously given away (or at least pretended to give away).
> 
> So I feel quite justified in asking whether this is a policy change of
> some kind, or what is it?

It is a resolictation of an existing contract to perform specific 
technical tasks.  It's not magic, and so far it does not appear to 
be any policy change (although I think we should wait to see the 
actual statement of work to be certain of that...)

FYI,
/John

____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, visit:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing

For all other list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance
To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t