[CWG-Stewardship] [IANA-issues] CWG RFP 2C - Draft Triage of IANA Functions Contract

[Milton L Mueller]

Alan,
Thanks for your work on this.

While the current IANA contract is an extremely useful guidepost to the transition, I have always been concerned that using it as a starting point for discussion creates a bit of a "tail wagging the dog" phenomenon.

We need to figure out what kind of accountability and operational arrangements we want _first_, and then design a contract that reflects them. What seems to be happening here is that we are letting the existing contract define what we want, and then adjusting our proposal to that.

I know that was not your intention, but the bias is revealed in a number of ways. One simple example is that the current contract was designed to keep protocols, names and numbers under ICANN, whereas that is not necessarily an outcome we need to retain. Thus, anything that it out of scope of this CWG should not be marked "Retain." Out of scope means out of scope, we don't discuss it.

With that as a preamble, here are some more specific comments:

C.1.2 Why on earth would we want to retain C.1.2, which describes all the preceding USG contracts?
That is highly relevant legally if the US Commerce Dept. NTIA is the principal, but completely irrelevant going forward.

C.1.3 remember that we are only developing the proposal for the names part.

C.2.1. Your description of the section fails to mention that this is the site where the contractor is required to be wholly US owned, located in US jurisdiction, etc. Think that needs modification?

C.2.4. Assumes that all of the IANA functions are in the same entity. This assumption is not warranted at the present time.

C.2.9.4  You propose to retain this but why would we want the IANA to continue operating the .int domain? This is obviously a historical artifact and is completely unrelated to the core IANA functions related to DNS. It brings IANA into operations and registry policy and thus dilutes appropriate separations and possibly even corrupts its functions. .INT should go somewhere else.

C.2.12 is micromanagement and assumes that ICANN is the contractor, yet you have proposed no modification. This provision would have to be extensively modified.

C.4 could be superseded by an SLA

C.6 the Conflict of Interest provisions of this were added in response to certain events pertaining to he ICANN board, and again the relevance of this might be minimized by a truly independent contracting process.

I reiterate again the danger of hanging too much of our process on this methodology. We need to decide what kind of arrangements we want first, and design the contract around those requirements - not the other way around.



From: cwg-stewardship-bounces at icann.org [mailto:cwg-stewardship-bounces at icann.org] On Behalf Of Allan MacGillivray
Sent: Friday, October 24, 2014 4:15 PM
To: cwg-stewardship at icann.org
Subject: [CWG-Stewardship] [IANA-issues] CWG RFP 2C - Draft Triage of IANA Functions Contract

Please find attached an initial draft of the triage of the IANA functions contract as discussed on the CWG call this week.

The first document is the draft Triage itself, organized as per our meeting this week.  In the second I have pasted the provisions that I have brought together all of the provisions that I categorized as "Likely Needs Improving"  and "Linked to Accountability and Oversight".   I know that a number of you, including Chuck Gomes, Kris Seeburn, Greg Shatan, James Gannon, Guru Acharya, Mary Uduma, Wanawit Ahkuputra, and Pitinan Kooarmornpatana have all volunteered to work on this.  Thank you.  I have sent the drafts to the full list as I do not have all of your emails.  Could I ask that anyone who has already volunteered, or anyone that wishes to do so now, to respond quickly to this email so that we might start a CWG RFP2C list.

I invite you to review the current draft documents.  I am hoping that this can be done in the documents themselves.  But if the comments and changes become too cumbersome, I will ask Bart or Marika to suggest how we can deal with these.  In closing let me make a general comment.  I see the objective of this exercise as being to identify potential issues that will need to be addressed at some point.  I do not, however, see the resolution of these issues as being part of this SWG's work.  Rather I see its objective as being to inform the work of the other SWG's, RFP3 in particular.

Regards

Allan

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