[discuss] [governance] U.S. to Give Up Oversight of Web Policymaking Body

Sun Mar 16 17:27:57 UTC 2014

Just to avoid a potential misunderstanding...

On 03/16/2014 04:30 PM, John Curran wrote:
> SM - Yes, I am quite aware... I intentionally remained high-level in this description
> (omitting WG/IETF and IAB/IOHC details) for clarity; the point being that the IANA
> performs clerical work but also policy _administration_ (i.e. receiving and processing
> individual requests for assignments, see <http://www.iana.org/protocols/apply>)  Some 
> of these requests require expert review per the specified registry policy but some are 
> simply made by the IANA via first-come, first serve assignment policy.

IANA applies the policies that the IETF specify which can be e.g.
First Come First Served (FCFS), or expert review or others.

If the IETF chooses expert review its the IESG for the IETF who hire
and fire experts, not IANA. (Mostly hire since almost all registries
are uncontroversial almost all of the time.)

Another potential policy is IETF review, where changes need
to go through an IETF consensus process - these days folks are more
keen on FCFS or expert review since there's less overhead, but in
all cases the IETF sets policy and appoint experts and IANA's role
is clerical (and very well done in my experience).

Clerical btw doesn't mean obvious either, e.g. its common that IANA
have to chase down IESG folks to appoint an expert when a request
comes in for a registry with no or a missing expert. There is
inherently a large pile corner cases when dealing with a lot of
fairly different registries as they do.

S.

PS: John, I know you know, just sent this as your mail could be
mis-read as saying that IANA pick experts.