[DT-F] Design Team F kickoff

[David Conrad]

Alan,

> On this subject, is there any history of IANA not following policy, with or
> without NTIA catching it?

How far back in history do you want to go?  My understanding (from
participants) was that part of the reason RFC 1591 was written was because
of accusations that the IANA of that time (Jon Postel) was not following
(largely undocumented) policy, albeit NTIA wasn't around to catch it at the
time.  After ICANN was created, there were numerous accusations that the
IANA of that time (Louis Touton) violated policy in a variety of ways,
resulting in various repercussions, some of which involved NTIA and
contractual modifications to prevent similar occurrences.  Back when I ran
IANA, there were accusations that we violated policy when .UM was
de-delegated, however in that case NTIA was a party to the de-delegation
(since .UM is a US ccTLD).  I'm not aware of any more recent examples.

Part of the issue here is that the view of whether or not a policy is being
followed is often a result of different interpretations of that policy.  In
the cases I mentioned above, I'm fairly certain that the principals involved
did NOT believe they were violating policy (I certainly did not believe the
de-delegation of .UM was out of policy).  As discussed in Design Team "D",
the information NTIA has in this matters is quite limited and they generally
were not in a position to question ICANN's self-certification that policy
was followed.  

In terms of requirements, I suspect it would be appropriate for there to be
a requirement for a mechanism by which an appeal can be filed in cases where
there are concerns policy hasn't been followed.  This may be a topic that
has already been covered in Design Team "M".  However, I would note that the
application of an appeal would only be effective after the fact, and this
may be too late.  For example, if an out-of-policy change request is
processed that changes the name servers for a popular top-level domain, the
fact that an appeal can be filed and, after being accepted, processed, and a
determination made that the change was out of policy, have that change
reversed probably will not address the lost business and reputational damage
caused by that out-of-policy change.

Regards,
-drc



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