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How ICANN pressures 'net engineers to give it behind-the-scenes control of the web

We must have IANA! We must have IANA!

What's going on behind the curtain?

These latest revelations are just the latest in a string of efforts by ICANN to ensure the organization gains full control of the IANA contract, with minimal impact on its current procedures.

Initially, ICANN tried to control the process by announcing two separate processes – one looking into the IANA transition, and a second at its own accountability improvements – while insisting the two were not related.

That effort was beaten down after an unprecedented letter by the leaders of every one of ICANN's supporting organizations and advisory committees that said the two processes must be connected.

Next, ICANN was accused of stacking the deck by purposefully excluding groups skeptical of ICANN’s efforts, and by trying to give ICANN's chairman the right to personally select the members of the group that would decide the final proposal. That was also beaten back.

ICANN's staff then produced a "scoping document" that would limit discussion both on topics and in the way in which they could be discussed. Another furore forced another backtrack.

Then, at the NetMundial conference in Sao Paulo, ICANN used its co-organizer status to force a last-minute change to the final document that would have seen it recommend a clear split between the operational and policy aspects of the IANA function - effectively keeping IANA as a separate entity within ICANN.

A few months later, ICANN's lawyers produced a document in which they claimed many of the initial plans for the IANA contract and changes to ICANN itself were illegal under California law.

When the internet community decided as a result that it was important to have independent legal advice on its plans, ICANN's legal team inserted itself onto the relevant sub-team. That sub-team was then closed off to internet community members, and ICANN's lawyers helped decide both the scope and approach as well as the legal team that was chosen to provide advice.

Its first significant piece of advice to the broader group was to drop a plan to have the IANA contract held by an external party and only consider either giving IANA to ICANN or setting it up as an ICANN subsidiary. ICANN's senior counsel remains the group's secretariat.

Despite all these efforts, however, the fundamental recommendations from all three parts of the IANA contract remain the same:

  1. It must be possible to separate the IANA contract from ICANN at some possible future date
  2. There must be stronger accountability measures on ICANN if the US government role is to disappear

Having failed to stop these recommendations through process, then in public, ICANN is now attempting to undermine the internet community's wishes in private.

Its strategy appears to be to get the numbers and protocols groups to agree to put ICANN in permanent charge of their IANA functions. In that effort, it claims to speak for the US government, which is hamstrung thanks a Congressional budget rider.

The second part of the strategy is then to insist that all the IANA functions – including the most complex names aspect – must be held together in a single function.

If it achieves both those goals, ICANN may effectively bypass mechanisms that the names group is developing that would allow a review group to decide to split the IANA functions away from ICANN at some future point if it fails to live up to expectations and agreements.

Reinforcing perceptions

Unfortunately for ICANN, each step it takes to undermine the process and put itself in charge simply reinforces the belief that it cannot be trusted to run such a critical function without strict safeguards. And the best safeguard is to make it possible to remove IANA from the organization altogether.

What is baffling from the internet engineers' point of view is why ICANN does not put the same amount of energy and effort into funding and improving the IANA functions as it does into trying to lock them down.

Each of the three IANA groups – names, numbers and protocols – have repeatedly noted that they are happy with how ICANN carries out those functions.

If ICANN really wants to retain IANA, all it has to do is keep its customers happy. Refusing to accept those groups' carefully developed proposals and trying to strong-arm them in private while claiming to agree in public is not going to help in that. ®

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