Proposal on IANA Stewardship Transition examined by NTIA
On 9 June 2016, the National Telecommunications & Information Administration of the US Department of Commerce (NTIA) took a public position on the IANA Stewardship Transition proposal.
The telecommunications authority received the proposal from the ICANN community for the transition of the so-called IANA functions to the multi-stakeholder community on 10 March 2016, and in the following months undertook an in-depth examination of it. Last week the NTIA announced that the criteria they had formulated in March 2014 are completely fulfilled by the proposal.
A central component of the requirements is a set of measures for the preservation and improvement of the accountability of ICANN to the community. The community is made up of companies, technical experts, governments and civil-society groups. “The foremost objective is to guarantee the stability, security and openness of the Domain Name System, and with this, that of the entire Internet”, explains Thomas Rickert, Director of Names and Numbers at the eco Association, and Co-Chair of the working group responsible for developing these measures. The newly-developed rules should ensure that the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) can also in the future exercise the complete supervision of the IANA-functions responsibly and transparently. In the end, the Internet is a network of networks which, for the last two decades, has been based and run on a system of voluntary standards, best practices, and the cooperation of the multi-stakeholder community, as well as on mutual trust.
Dr. Steve Crocker, Chairman of ICANN, also commented in a blog post on icann.org of his relief that the next important step in the implementation of the IANA Stewardship Transition has been successfully accomplished.
The completion of the privatization of ICANN should now only have to overcome political hurdles. In the US Congress, there are those who take a critical view of the US government relinquishing the supervision of IANA. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is, among other things, responsible for the administration of the so-called Root Zone of the Domain Name System, and as a result, of all Top-Level Domains in the Internet.
