[CWG-Stewardship] Remember to send questions and comments to legal advice from Sidley Austin

[Milton L Mueller]

> -----Original Message-----
> By contrast, it seems to me that setting up an organization that is tightly
> confined to IANA has _got_ to be much less work than setting up an
> organization that is responsible for accountability over policy.
> You can put lots of restrictions on what can get into the IANA organization,
> and thereby restrict the kinds of policies that it is allowed to implement to
> be just like the kinds of thing that are already done routinely.  All of that is
> working fine anyway, as far as anyone has been able to say, so just
> emulating the thing that's working shouldn't be a tall order.
> 
> Building a new set of accountability controls over policy, on the other hand,
> sounds like a messy job that could take ages (for some value of "ages",
> where one such possible value is ∞).

Ah, I misunderstood your original point, then. 

Yes, I would actually agree with you that a new entity that is strictly confined to the IANA functions is much simpler to set up than one that exercises oversight over policy. Indeed, such an entity would be like recreating ICANN (which is in some ways what the CCWG is potentially doing ;-) 

However, I did not interpret Paul Kane's call for an external affiliate to be an entity that would be "responsible for accountability over policy." I thought it was more of a contract co-type entity that would choose the IANA operator. 

Maybe we should let Paul respond to these things.

In the meantime, we can warn the CCWG that they are racing against heat death of the universe ;-)