[CWG-RFP3] Contract re-bidding at regular intervals or permanent mandate?

[Milton L Mueller]

ICANN was fundamentally created to handle the IANA functions (cf the Bylaws, where coordination of allocation and assignment of the three sets of unique identifiers is mission n°1). It has performed this without major problems so far and it should not be excluded a priori to confer this mission permanently to the

MM: Actually there were major problems in the early days. And the logic of saying, “you have been going a good job recently while you were accountable to us, so now you don’t need to be accountable anymore” has always escaped me. The NTIA role was not fundamentally about workflow or mandate, it was about accountability. Periodic contracting is the only acceptable accountability mechanism on the table, imho. There can be all kinds of oversight mechanisms but they are ineffective, even meaningless unless someone can pull the trigger on a contract.

Were the overall community to agree - in the course of these stewardship transition discussions - that this mission is conferred on a permanent basis to ICANN, a large part of this problem goes away.

MM: And so does accountability!! That will never be an acceptable solution to a large part of this community.

It would then transform into the following questions:
- who sets the SLAs for the three sets (in the case of this group, for the two names communities)?
- who controls performance vis-à-vis these SLAs?

MM: The whole concept of an SLA means, “I am selecting you to provide service, and if the service doesn’t meet the standards in the SLAs, I will go elsewhere. Without that recourse of moving the contract, an SLA is not very meaningful.

The situation is similar to the discussion on functional versus structural separation. The last IANA contract has established a useful functional separation and I sense that the community is keen on strengthening it, which seems legitimate and strongly agree with. Some, including you in particular, would prefer a completely separate entity.

Not any more. The main point of having a separate entity was to enhance accountability. If you can enhance accountability by periodically recontracting the IANA functions, all you need is functional separation in the short term.

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