[discuss] Roadmap for globalizing IANA

[Milton L Mueller]

-----Original Message-----
From: Jeanette Hofmann [mailto:jeanette at wzb.eu] 

>Regarding 4, your model seems so expansive and expensive that I 
>find it hard to imagine that Verisign's bill would exceed its cost in the long run.

No, this is a charge with no factual basis. The DNSA creates an operational process and pays someone to do it. While it may be expensive to create the DNSA, the actual root zone operations would be no more expensive than now, possibly less in the long term because less arbitrarily divided and no NTIA "man in the middle" - and the registries have an incentive to do it as efficiently as possible if they are paying for it. 

>Regarding 1 and 2, if the IANA function is indeed stripped off all policy 
>discretion, shouldn't it be possible to devise a contract that makes it more 
>or less irrelevant if the contracting partner is a huge DNSA apparatus or 
>just one organization?

An interesting suggestion. (Note that it pushes in the exact opposite direction of most of the other comments we are getting, about the alleged power of this DNSA and the need for even more 'stakeholders'. I like that)

It depends on who is contracting with whom. When you make this suggestion, are you suggesting that ICANN is the principal and DNSA the agent? Can't answer your question until you answer that one.

The virtue of the DNSA is that it would have buy-in from all the world's registries. The object here is globalization, remember? You are correct, however, that there would be a price in complexity of organization. 
The other virtue is that 'collective bargaining with ICANN' element, which I see you ignored in your response. 

>One could combine the contract-based model with a supervisory 
>board that ensures compliance and takes care of complaints.

Aha. And how is this "supervisory board" different from the registry-based governance structure we propose? 
I suspect that it is not different at all, just not as well thought out and the supervisors would not have as good an incentive structure 

Keep in mind that root zone entries with DNSSEC are auditable and harder to manipulate.