[discuss] USG- IANA relationship (was: Interesting article)

[John Curran]

On Jan 21, 2014, at 5:46 PM, Pranesh Prakash <pranesh at cis-india.org> wrote:
> Milton L Mueller <mueller at syr.edu> [2014-01-17 02:55:32 +0000]:
>> Even less practical. ICANN has contracts with a host of multinational businesses implicating billions of dollars; it can't just dissolve itself and reincorporate somewhere else.
> 
> That's a very interesting point.  Wouldn't this problem also have been created had the NTIA decided that they were going to award the IANA contract to a body other than ICANN?  How would it have been resolved then?

_In theory_, ICANN's role of being the Internet identifier coordination body,
and more specifically - the DNS Policy Development organization, is distinct 
from ICANN's registry administration role (performed via the IANA function 
contract with NTIA and MOU with the IAB/IETF [RFC 2860])   I'll be the first
to admit that this distinction can be very difficult to discern at times due
to the adjacency of the various roles that has occurred over the years.

Back during the resolictation of the IANA function contract, I was asked what
would happen if the contract were awarded to another party.  Presuming (for 
sake of argument) that the IETF had been in concurrence, it would have simply
meant that some other organization was maintaining the records of what is in
each of the various IP, protocol, and DNS registries.  The policy that the new
contract recipient would use would likely have remained the NRO/ASO for IP 
global address policy, the IETF for protocol parameter registries, and ICANN
for DNS root zone.  ICANN's relations with the various DNS registrars and 
registries may not have changed in the least, as the IANA functions are 
predominantly administrative and technical in nature based on policies 
developed by others.

In any case, it would have been a _very_ exciting time.

FYI,
/John

Disclaimer: My views alone.  Do not try this at home; some steps have been 
            omitted for purpose of explanation.