The US Department of Commerce last week quietly published a document detailing its decision to sole-source the contract for the so-called IANA function to ICANN, as opposed to opening the contract for competitive bidding.
ICANN and a spokesperson for the DoC’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration both confirmed the extension, although ICANN general counsel Louis Touton added that no contract has yet been signed.
IANA is responsible for maintaining the definitive list of which organizations, individuals, and domain servers are associated with approximately 240 country-code top-level domains (ccTLDs), such as .uk, .us, and .fr.
The decision will cause concern to some in the international community, particularly those concerned in the policy aspects of the ccTLD industry. Some ccTLD operators had considered a counter-bid for the IANA contract before its March expiration.
A statement buried six clicks into a Federal web site heavily suggests that the ICANN-DoC Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and the IANA contract are essentially inseparable, and that ICANN is the only party fit to run IANA.
The NTIA document said that ICANN, having assumed key resources and associated privatization responsibilities under the MoU is therefore the only responsible entity that can continue to provide seamless performance of the IANA functions.
As a further link, the three-year IANA contract will come up for renewal at periods of six months, one year, one year, and six months – paced to coincide exactly with the times the MoU comes up for renewal, Touton and the NTIA said.
ICANN’s Touton added that the decision was made because of how closely linked the policy-making functions of ICANN are with the policy-implementing functions of IANA, and that it wouldn’t make sense for a third party to take over IANA.
ICANN has been accused in the past of using the IANA function to further its own ends. One of the Herculean tasks in the MoU requires ICANN to sign stable operating agreements with each of the ccTLD operators, but this has proved difficult.
In the majority of the cases when ICANN has signed such an agreement, it has coincided with the re-delegation of a ccTLD to a new operator. The most recent such deal was with the new government of Afghanistan.
Last October, a number of ccTLDs, disgruntled with their treatment by ICANN over the four years of its existence, said they would consider mounting a bid to take over the IANA function, being the groups most affected by its decisions.
But the current international political climate would have made the US venturing outside its borders for a contractor unlikely. Recent denial-of-service attacks against the DNS root servers has created a mindset among some where the DNS is a US national, rather than international, resource that must be protected against terrorism like any physical target.
Source: Computerwire
