[CWG-Stewardship] FW: [client com] IPR Memo

[Mueller, Milton L]

> -----Original Message-----
> 
> The IETF Trust is excellent and full of trustworthy people.
> I trust them completely to protect IETF interests.
> Their  fiduciary responsibility is, in fact, to the IETF interests.
> In a crisis that could be problematic for the Names interests.

IANA is a resource that pertains to all IETF protocols, not just domain names (DNS). Thus it is appropriate for a trust rooted in the IETF to control its identity. 

I would like to know more from Avri about how "names interests" (as if the names community had a unified set of 'interests' rather than being a collection of warring interests) might conflict with IETF interests. The worst scenario one can imagine is that for some unknown reason IETF would refuse to allow the names community's desired IFO to use the trademarks. This seems easily remedied. Put into the transition plan a simple commitment that IETF Trust would recognize the recommendations of an IANA Functions Review. After all, AT BEST those who favor ICANN as the TM holder can propose that ICANN should make the same kind of commitment. The difference, of course, is that ICANN has a huge conflict of interest in any attempt to transfer the domain and marks, and the IETF doesn't.

I find the accountability concerns expressed here about IETF to be odd, kind of like the psychological malady known as projection, where one attributes one's own flaws and problems onto some innocent victim and blames them for it. I am pretty familiar with the quirks and clubbiness that sometimes characterizes IETF hierarchy, but the IETF isn't in the business of making money off IANA or DNS, unlike certain other participants in this process, and it doesn't have a long history of accountability problems and abuses, as ICANN does. It can't compel anyone to use its standards, it doesn't issue contracts of adhesion as ICANN does, it doesn't tax its users and generate tens of millions of dollars or dabble in geopolitics. It main interest seems to be in making things work. The choice between the two seems pretty straightforward to me, especially given ICANN's rooting in the names community only.