Numbers community proposal contact points with CWG’s Draft IANA Stewardship Transition proposal

[Axel Pawlik <axel.pawlik@xxxxxxxx>]

To: CWG-Stewardship
Cc: IANA Stewardship Transition Coordination Group (ICG)


Dear colleagues of the CWG, and the ICG,

We observe that the CWG has proposed that a new legal entity, the
"Post-Transition IANA" (PTI) would be formed as an affiliate of ICANN to
handle the existing IANA naming functions, including the transfer of
administrative staff and related resources, processes, data and know-how
from the present IANA operation.  It is our understanding that IANA
personal and systems are presently shared among IANA tasks
performed in support of names, numbers, and protocol registry
activities, and as a result, the formation of PTI would result in
non-naming IANA functions also being moved into PTI.

The Internet numbers community’s IANA Stewardship Transition Proposal
(as developed by the CRISP team) calls for ICANN to continue as the IANA
Functions Operator for the IANA numbering services by means of a Service
Level Agreement (SLA) with the RIRs.  At this time, we expect the RIRs
to follow that approach, and thus to rely upon the SLA contractual
measures with ICANN for oversight of the provision of IANA Internet
numbering services.  We do not expect the numbers community to rely upon
the proposed PTI separation from ICANN for purposes of oversight of IANA
numbering services, but also do not foresee any incompatibility between
the CWG’s proposal for formation of the PTI and our contracting with
ICANN for its continuance as the IANA Numbering Services Operator.

We understand that (per the CWG proposal) the PTI would be formed as an
wholly owned affiliate of ICANN, and do not anticipate any issue related
from this structure.  We would request that the mission of the PTI be
strictly constrained to the operation of the IANA registries in
conformance with adopted policy, and find the CWG proposed structure of
the PTI Board (an ICANN-designated board with the minimum statutorily
required responsibilities and powers) to be acceptable, in principle. We
reserve further specific comments until additional details are
available. We note that the CWG proposes a Customer Standing Committee
to perform the operational responsibilities towards monitoring of
performance of the IANA naming function, and the RIRs would be willing
to provide a numbers community liaison for that Customer Standing
Committee in consideration of the dependency that the numbers community
has on IANA naming services related to the global reverse DNS domains
(IN-ADDR.ARPA, IP6.ARPA).

We hope this information is useful to the CWG in finalization of its
IANA stewardship transition proposal for the names community, and look
forward to continued collaboration as needed.

kind regards,

Axel Pawlik,
Chair,
NRO Executive Council