[CWG-Stewardship] [IANA-issues] Fwd: Names Community vs the other two communities

[Milton L Mueller]

2.  All Stakeholder Groups should be part of the Entity/Group with ICANN Oversight.  Oversight of the IANA functions for the naming community should not be left solely (or even primarily) to its direct "customers."  An essential part of the multistakeholder construct is that all Internet stakeholders (aka "the Global Multistakeholder Community") are affected, directly or indirectly, by these matters.  This CWG is roughly representative of those stakeholders.  Any group or entity designated or created to hold steward/oversight responsibility should be similarly representative.

MM: I disagree at the most fundamental level. This position is based on a fallacy. The fallacy is to confuse the accountability and input of ICANN’s policy making process with the accountability of and input into the IANA functions.

All stakeholders should have a voice in and fair representation in the process of policy development. But once a policy is agreed, the implementation of policies by the IANA is a derivative technical and operational function in which its direct customers are the primary stakeholders. Broad public oversight would be meaningless at best (because random members of the public would not know what is going on at that level) and dangerous at worst (because there would be temptations to circumvent agreed policies by politically intervening at the implementation level).

I suspect that people who argue for broad representation of IANA contracting function are people who want there to be a capability for some kind of political circumvention of the policy process at the IANA level. In other words, they think policy should be made by IANA rather than by ICANN. That’s wrong, fundamentally wrong, and that is why IGP – and many others – have argued as a principle that policy and IANA implementation need to be clearly separated. If you want to change policy, do it in the policy process. If you want to monitor technical implementation of a policy by a registry, the operators of a registry are in the best position to do that. Yes, there should be some public interest representation in a contracting authority (IGP proposed that, too) but mainly for transparency purposes and for keeping them honest. IANA should be primarily accountable to the people who actually use its services and whose basic functions and activities are dependent on those services.

Whether or not one thinks they used it, the US government’s authority over modifications to the root zone created the potential for that kind of political intervention at the implementation level. This set a very bad precedent for the world that we are still dealing with. Now some people are trying to reproduce that situation by making IANA oversight a way for interest groups who don’t get what they want in a policy process to get a second, back door bite at the apple. Let’s reject that clearly.

If one knows what the performance of the IANA functions actually are, the idea that every stakeholder in the world should be engaged in “oversight” of its performance is pretty ridiculous. You might as well say there should be public, multistakeholder oversight over what secretaries a registry hires, what cars they rent, what buildings they live in. After all if their cars break down you as a customer might be affected, right? If their building power goes out, you might be affected, right?

If the ccTLD for .za submits a request for a change in its root zone file data neither you, Greg – nor I – are in a position to say whether the request should happen or whether it has been implemented correctly. You may argue that internet users under .za will be affected if the IANA implementation of a root zone change for .za is performed badly, but the answer is that the .za registry would be affected immediately and far more damagingly than any individual customer would be, and in terms of both incentives and knowledge, is in a much better position to prevent that from happening than any other stakeholder. So if you really care about the security, accuracy and accountability of registry changes, we will be relying on the primary users, no matter what kind of a structure we set up.


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