[CWG-Stewardship] drift in v5

[Andrew Sullivan]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2015 at 04:53:56PM +0000, Milton L Mueller wrote:

> ICANN/PTI is an IFO. And that is central to the controversy.  Both
> the IETF and the CRISP team wanted the marks separate from ICANN
> because ICANN is an IFO and they did not want a specific IFO to own
> those marks.

The IETF did _not_ want "the marks separate from ICANN".  The IETF's
consensus was clearly that it didn't need that.  Later, it became
clear that nobody would object if others wanted the IETF Trust to hold
things.

Some of us think that the disposition of the mark and domain name
doesn't matter, because there are in effect only two possibilities for
separation.  In the event of a friendly separation in which all
parties are co-operating, then the right redirections will be added (at
the http level, for instance) for the relevant resources, and there
won't be any operational problem.  On the other hand, in the event of
a contested separation, there is no reason at all to suppose that a
legal agreement would be helpful: the incumbent operator would contest
the change, regardless of who had control of the resource, and the
remedies would have to be pursued via the law.  That would be too slow
to be practical, so the relevant operational community would have to
make an emergency change anyway.  It would be extremely disruptive no
matter what the outcome, and so the emergency change would be
effectively a permanent one.  

Best regards,

A

-- 
Andrew Sullivan
ajs at anvilwalrusden.com