[CWG-Stewardship] Update on IANA IPR

[Mueller, Milton L]

From: Greg Shatan [mailto:gregshatanipc at gmail.com]

Andrew Sullivan a little while ago.  Many good and important things may reside in IETF RFCs, but the "identity of the IANA" is not one of them.  That is not consistent with what trademarks stand for, or what trademark "source" means.  A brand identity is associated with the entity that is responsible for carrying out a service

MM: This is where you go off the track, in my opinion. “The IANA” as the IETF defines it is not a “service.” It is an authoritative role regarding protocol compatibility that is defined in the RFC I and others referenced. To quote:

To insure that such quantities have consistent values and interpretations in different implementations, their assignment must be administered by a central authority. For IETF protocols, that role is provided by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) (RFC 2434)

The IETF is the source of that role and of the protocols that require registries. The IANA Functions operator (IFO) is a service. It is semantically easy to confuse “The IANA’ with “The IANA Functions Provider” and people have often unwittingly used them interchangeably, but they are distinct and the distinction is pretty important in the current context.

For a copyright owner, it would make good commercial sense, since a bad cover version or movie would have a negative effect on value, but there's no legal requirement.  For a patent owner, there's no overriding reason to do so.  In contrast, quality control is the bedrock of trademark licensing.  Without adequate quality control (and policing and enforcement) in contract and in fact, the trademark asset itself will become diluted and ultimately abandoned.  So, any trademark owner, including the IETF Trust, must impose quality control standards over its licensees.  It cannot be a passive
licensee.

MM:  I look forward to the email you propose to write below. The key question is: is it possible, or is it not, for the sum and substance of the IETF Trust’s “quality control” to be we will license the TM to whoever each operational community designates to be their IFO? If it is not possible for IETF Trust to do this, how is it possible for ICANN (the incumbent IFO) to do it? And  if it is possible, why not let’s figure out the best way to do it.

By the way that constraint on “quality control” – and only that – is what I mean by “making the IETF Trust accountable.” Accountability does not mean complex new structures that allow anyone in the world claiming to be an internet user to select IETF officers, or to review and approve IETF standards, nor does it mean new corporatist representational structures arbitrarily apportioning slots among different regions, operational communities, etc. etc.

Given the ICANN Board's recent announcement, there's really no reason to continue discussing ICANN retaining the marks

MM: Agreed. So, let’s not.

What makes sense at this point is to discuss what would need to be done to the IETF Trust

MM: I really don’t like that phrasing. ;-0  I don’t think we need to “do something to” the IETF Trust per se; we need to condition the transfer of the marks to it in a way that ensures that it respects the choices of the OCs as to who they want their IFO to be.

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