The letter sent by the US government to the Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA) finally saw the light of day after we went to press last night. Most reports have portrayed it as the Department of Commerce saying to the IANA that it accepts its plan as more or less an a fait accompli, but it just needs to tinker with it slightly to be made the basis of the non-profit corporation to run the domain name and numbering system. That’s not the impression we get from the letter. Having followed this process closely for a number of years, if the US government sticks to its word, we believe the IANA still has a lot of changes to make before it is accepted as the new non-profit corporation, which it has dubbed the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The letter was actually sent by Becky Burr, the associate administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Agency (NTIA) within the Department of Commerce, not Ira Magaziner at the White House, as previously thought. Burr sent similar, but shorter letters to the members o the Boston Working Group and Open Root Server Confederation (ORSC), which both submitted revisions to the IANA proposals to the DoC. Clearly, the DoC views the IANA proposal as the lead proposal, and says as much. But it also says it must talk with the BWG and ORSC people to broaden the consensus. The Boston group’s de facto spokesperson Karl Auerbach said he had already been contacted by IANA on this matter, but Einar Stefferud, temporary chairman of the board of the ORSC, said he had not yet been contacted, although he probably will have by today. Burr said the IANA, based at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California (USC) and until his sudden death last week, run by Jon Postel, would have to provide the DoC with suggestions for establishing some sort of membership structure for ICANN, ensuring financial and representational accountability, incorporating management of the country-code domains and a number of other issues, which we documented yesterday. The IANA has still not got back to us and the DoC did not return our calls. So much for the commitment to the principles of openness and transparency mentioned in the final paragraph of the letter.
