[discuss] shifts in IANA/accountability discussion: your thoughts?

[John Curran]

On Jun 20, 2014, at 4:27 AM, Kleinwächter, Wolfgang <wolfgang.kleinwaechter at medienkomm.uni-halle.de> wrote:
> ...
> Insofar, the AoC Review Team model is not just a blueprint, it is a source of inspiration which has to be further enhanced with regard to the specific needs of the function or - as an achitect would argue - form follows function. 

Agreed.

For instance, one could imagine an "IANA Stewardship Transition Plan" which 
made plain the fact that the IANA registries are in fact "IETF IANA" registries, 
with policy authority for the general-purpose registries (names, addresses) 
having already been durably delegated to organizations which are representative 
of the served communities (ICANN for DNS, RIRs for IP address space); these 
registry organizations that agree to follow open and transparent processes, 
and agree to have that confirmed periodically by well-defined independent 
third-party multi-stakeholder review process (i.e. the AoC review team model, 
as appropriately strengthened)

Such a plan, fully elaborated by the community (once accepted by the USG) 
would fully and completely resolve the authority confusion, while also 
ending any unique USG role in oversight.  

It would leverage some existing but strengthened accountability review 
processes, and would leave the IAB/IETF at a safe and healthy distance from 
such organizations, except in the rare case of an actual organizational failure 
so significant that the independent review resulted in a finding that one of 
these organizations was no longer representative of the served community; only 
then raising the specter of either an aggressive program to cure such a fault, 
or face potential policy authority redelegation to another organization more 
representative of the served community.  While I'd expect this to never actually 
happen, it is necessary to contemplate the possibility if we're to provide a 
truly useful feedback mechanism to hold the general purpose registry (DNS, IP) 
organizations to be accountable to their communities.

/John

Disclaimer: my views alone.