[CWG-Stewardship] Comments on IANA Transition Flow Chart

Tue Nov 25 23:16:41 UTC 2014

Hi all, 

To follow up on our Chairs' note about attendance at the F2F meeting, here
are some statistics:
* All but one of the 19 members participated in the meeting either in person
or remotely (Fouad Bajwa did not participate, but he had Alan Greenberg
representing him in person an an alternate)
* 40 participants joined the meeting which is our average attendance per
regular meeting as well
* Of the 40 participants, 12 attended in person
Also, I've updated the attendance log for the full CWG meetings:
https://community.icann.org/x/ET3xAg.

Best, 
Grace

From:  Jonathan Robinson <jrobinson at afilias.info>
Organization:  Afilias
Reply-To:  Jonathan Robinson <jrobinson at afilias.info>
Date:  Tuesday, November 25, 2014 12:24 PM
To:  'Milton L Mueller' <mueller at syr.edu>, "cwg-stewardship at icann.org"
<cwg-stewardship at icann.org>
Subject:  Re: [CWG-Stewardship] Comments on IANA Transition Flow Chart

Milton (& CWG members and participants),

Apologies for the relatively slow turnaround on responding to your questions
which do seek to create a better sense of the meeting for all who were not
present or unable to participate in full.

Lise & I have now talked and would like to assist with some thoughts
relating to the points / questions and have included input in-line below.

I trust that you will find these useful and hope that the time taken to
respond will not mean the input is too out of synch with other related
discussions.

Thanks,

Jonathan and Lise

From: Milton L Mueller [mailto:mueller at syr.edu]
Sent: 22 November 2014 17:26
To: cwg-stewardship at icann.org
Subject: Re: [CWG-Stewardship] Comments on IANA Transition Flow Chart

Hello all,
As someone who was not at the Frankfurt meeting I am trying to make sense of
this Œflow chart.¹

As far as I can tell, this is a proposal  a response to RFP section 3  in
the simplified form of a Œflow chart.¹ 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?

An independent incorporated entity (i.e., outside of ICANN). Its only
purpose is to enter into the contract with ICANN. It will be governed by the
multistakeholder community, (including but not limited to the ICANN
multistakeholder community); details are TBD. It is expected that this
entity would have no staff.

2. Who is the ³periodic review team²? 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? 

The review team is a formal group arising from the multistakeholder
community that will be selected to oversee these processes, serve as a "path
of escalation" for the customer standing committee, and give instructions to
the contracting entity. How members from this group are to be selected is
TBD for the moment but the objectives are (1) that it be adequately
representative of the communities and (2) these are not paid positions.  It
is likely that existing ICANN structures would be used to organize the
review team and the customer committee, with safeguards to ensure their
independence.

3. I understand Œperformance review¹ 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 ³customer standing committee² and the
³periodic review team²? 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
operator¹s root zone file modifications or interactions with the IANA.

The customer standing committee is expected to be mostly made up of a
limited number of registry representatives, potentially with liaisons from
other stakeholder groups. The work of the customer committee is expected to
be mostly accepting and reviewing IANA reports on performance, ensuring they
are as requested, identifying any performance issues, assessing if they are
significant or not and escalating significant issues to the review team.
Also, producing an annual analysis of IANA performance for the public and
the review team. Again no paid positions and everything this committee does
should be completely open and transparent (essentially administrative
mechanics).

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 ³presumption of renewal² 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 ³periodic review team² 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.

Because the "flow chart" focused on groups to perform certain functions, it
did not set out particular detail on the contract post-transition.  The
review team is not an alternative to a contract of limited duration. The
sense of the room seemed to be "don't fix it if it ain't broke'. In that
context, it should be noted that the current contract is for a limited
duration and thus it is anticipated that the next one will be as well.  That
being said, there are no provisions currently envisioned which block the
periodic review team from deciding whatever it thinks is best at the end of
the initial term of the first post-transition agreement.

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?

The details are to be determined.  Your second sentence accurately
summarizes the "sense of the room" on the scope (and limitation of scope)
for appeals.

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/¹flow chart¹ will have to take place on this list.

We would not characterise the meeting or participation, or the outcome, in
those terms. We can provide the information on participation in person and
from remote locations if desired. We would say that significant progress was
made toward a holistic solution, that both participation and representation
were broad and strong, and that there was a sense of convergence from much
of the group on key ideas.  That in no way minimises the significant amount
of work still to be done, including work on developing consensus.  It should
be emphasised that no one has signed off on anything except a concept to get
an initial version of a proposal completed for approval by the CWG, which
needs to be published on 1 December. It is further expected that this
solution framework will not be extremely detailed, but will be enough for
serious consideration, due to time and an expectation that the results of
our consultation could have a significant impact on the workings of the
proposal.

--MM

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/cwg-stewardship/attachments/20141125/dde1be00/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 5097 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/cwg-stewardship/attachments/20141125/dde1be00/smime-0001.p7s>