Perhaps the single most important response to the government’s domain name system white paper was that of the head of the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA), Jon Postel. He is credited with practically inventing the DNS as we know it and it was his proposals for change that have led to the situation today. The white paper recognizes IANA and Postel’s authority over the DNS – it is a government contractor after all – but notes that it is not formally organized or constituted. All the paper says is that it would make sense for Postel and other IANA staff to be involved in the creation of the new non-profit corporation that is to assume IANA’s roles. However, IANA, perhaps getting a little ahead of itself, has announced as part of its response, its reconstitution through an evolutionary process to a non-profit company, incorporated in the US, and will move out of the its current office at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California’s school of engineering. It says a board of directors will be nominated by organization in each of IANA’s four areas: address registries, name registries, protocol organizations and user and industry organizations. That board will elect a chief executive and will execute the duties of IANA. Postel says in a prepared statement that the changes in IANA come after discussions and input from the user community, the Internet Engineering Task Force, and the Internet Architecture Board, as well as the comments submitted after the green paper’s publication at the end of January. Postel was not available for comment yesterday. There will admittedly be very few people in the internet community that feel Postel and his staff should not play a role in the new IANA, or whatever the corporation will be called, but presenting the new IANA as a fait accompli is likely to get a few backs up within the community. After all, the IANA says that it gets its authority from the internet community, as it repeated to us yesterday. And not everybody, it seems has had their say just yet.
