[governance] UN controls the country code part of the Internet root, not US

[David Conrad]

Kerry,

On Dec 13, 2013, at 10:25 AM, Kerry Brown <kerry at kdbsystems.com> wrote:
> I think the people in this discussion are failing to distinguish who “owns” the ccTLD and the process by which the DNS zone for the ccTLD is inserted into the root.

Not surprising as the concept of who "owns" (or, as McTim mentions, "stewards") the ccTLD is highly ambiguous (I suspect purposefully) and/or contentious (a direct result of the ambiguity).

> I would argue that most ccTLDs would agree that the government of the country involved “owns" the ccTLD.

Some would.  A number would argue quite strongly against this, as would a number of folks who were involved in the drafting of RFC 1591. 

> I can’t imagine IANA not changing the delegation after receiving a legitimate request from a UN recognized government. The repercussions would be profound. 

It has happened a number of times and the repercussions were mostly a lot of unhappiness, people running to NTIA to demand IANA processes be shortcut/ignored (which NTIA never to my knowledge even considered), and even people running to the ITU where more entertainment ensued.

One of the problems is figuring out who speaks for the "government".  I've had personal experience where multiple ministries within a single country have each demanded IANA force a redelegation to their ministry (within days of each other). I've also had personal experience where a delegation to the UN-recognized "government" of a ISO-3166-designated region was objected to (with extreme insistence) by the UN-recognized "region administrator".  And then there were the cases where the folks the "government" nominated to run the TLD were opposed by other parts of the "government" (and, in some cases, pretty much everyone else in the country from ISPs to civil society to academia: "we don't want a combination of our equivalent of the NSA and the Mafia to operate our TLD").

Another problem is that the mission of ICANN is "to coordinate, at the overall level, the global Internet's systems of unique identifiers, and in particular to ensure the *stable and secure* operation of the Internet's unique identifier systems" and IANA has received demands to do redelegations to folks who were demonstrably unable to operate a DNS infrastructure in a "stable and secure" manner.  Should IANA staff do a redelegation when it is obvious the redelegation will fatally break the country's DNS infrastructure?

> Another point that hasn’t been brought up is that many ccTLDs do not have any contract with IANA/ICANN and pay no fees to have their zone in the root.

As far as I am aware, there are no contracts between ICANN and any ccTLD.  There are a number of agreements of various flavors, but I do not believe the vast majority pay any fees to ICANN for IANA-related services.

> The above not withstanding I have always considered that IANA is under control of the US government and would accede to any instructions from the US government regarding delegation.

In the sense that ICANN is under a contractual agreement to the US government to perform the IANA functions, this is true.  

> I don’t like this but I believe it is the reality. So far to my knowledge the US government has never intervened but in a time of war I could certainly imagine that it might happen.

To my knowledge, they have never intervened period (despite being at war, participating in UN sanction activities, not having diplomatic relations, etc. at times).

> I can also imagine a powerful lobby group (copyright) convincing the US government to alter a ccTLD zone.

If the US government did not take action during wartime, I'm skeptical it would take action at the demand of any lobbying group.

> Both of these cases would probably be the end of one root.

Exactly. 

> I would very much like to see the root moved out of US control but I am at a loss as to how this could be accomplished without eventually fracturing the root into several forks.

Isn't this part of what some of the various "Internet Governance" discussions trying to work out?

Regards,
-drc

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