[CWG-Stewardship] Comments on IANA Transition Flow Chart

[Milton L Mueller]

Hello all,
As someone who was not at the Frankfurt meeting I am trying to make sense of this 'flow chart.'

As far as I can tell, this is a proposal - a response to RFP section 3 - in the simplified form of a 'flow chart.' This does provide an overall view of what is being proposed with visual simplicity, but leaves unanswered many critical questions that would have to be dealt with before we can bring it back to our communities for evaluation and assessment of its acceptability.

Here are my questions:

1, Who or what is the IANA contracting entity? Is it inside ICANN or outside of ICANN? (Hint: it had better be outside if this idea is to conform to the principles of separability and accountability.) How is it governed?

2. Who is the "periodic review team"? Is it inside ICANN or outside of ICANN? How is it formed? Why is it different from the contracting authority; i.e., what is its legal or organizational relationship to the contracting authority?

3. I understand 'performance review' to be a fairly narrow assessment of how well the IANA performs its specified technical functions. If so, why is there a distinction between a "customer standing committee" and the "periodic review team"? While I can understand why, e.g., a civil society advocate might be extremely interested in whether IANA is not implementing policies that were passed, or implementing policies that were not accepted (these are accountability issues, not performance issues). But I do not understand what role a digital rights advocate or an intellectual property lawyer would play, say, in assessing the accuracy and security of a TLD operator's root zone file modifications or interactions with the IANA.

4. Accountability and true separability (both of which are recognized principles of this group) requires a periodic renewal of the contract in which there is no "presumption of renewal" and a willingness to entertain other providers of the functions. Periodicity minimizes the friction associated with reviews and with moving the contract by clarifying expectations well in advance. Periodicity is NOT inimical to continuity or to long-term investment by a well-behaved provider that satisfies its customers. The flow chart seems to contain a much weaker - and to me, unacceptable - concept of a "periodic review team" which is merely there to advise the incumbent contractor on how to improve service, just as the current ATRT merely advises ICANN on how to improve. Let me flag this as a deal-breaking issue for me and, I think, many others. If you want consensus this will have to be significantly changed.

5. Happy to see a binding, independent appeals process in there. But could someone tell me more detail what kind of appeals pertaining to policy implementation you had in mind? Hopefully this would not be a way for people who did not get what they wanted from the policy process to circumvent agreed policy by going after IANA implementation, but would instead be an avenue for people to challenge unauthorized or incorrect IANA implementations?

I have other questions, but these are the big ones.

Let me add that based on what  I have heard from various stakeholders who were in Frankfurt, that while progress was made many key people were absent, there was little feeling of consensus on key ideas and that we are still talking more about details than an acceptable approach to the whole solution. Therefore, a lot of discussion and modification of the proposal/'flow chart' will have to take place on this list.

--MM

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