ICANN said that the Department of Commerce had awarded it the contract to run the so-called IANA functions for the year starting October 1, with four one-year extensions available after it ends.
It’s the clearest indication yet that Commerce will extend its memorandum of understanding with ICANN, a separate contract that grants ICANN additional powers and which is also due to expire at the end of September.
The IANA functions include control of the pool of unallocated IP addresses, and the management of the root directory of the domain name system. IANA is responsible for handing IP addresses, albeit indirectly, to ISPs around the world, and for assigning country-code top-level domains to their registries.
ICANN president Paul Twomey said in a statement that the decision confirmed that ICANN is uniquely positioned to perform this function, language echoed by Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration division.
In February, NTIA publicly asked if anybody else thought they were up to task. It is not known if anybody else applied, but the rumor at the time was that NeuStar Inc was interested.
While IANA is a set of technical functions, with no money to be gained, it has substantial political clout, at least as far as such esoteric technical matters go.
IANA gets to decide whether to transfer management of country-level domains between parties, for example from a private company to a government entity, so it gets to negotiate with international governments. Because its decisions have to be rubber-stamped by Commerce, this rubs some countries the wrong way.
Control of IANA was a sticking point at last November’s World Summit on the Information Society, when several countries, none of which are especially friendly with the US, sought to have ICANN and IANA’s powers internationalized. That didn’t happen.
