The IANA Stewardship Transition has taken effect. On the night of 30 September to 1 October, the responsible telecommunications authority in the US Department of Commerce, the NTIA, allowed the contract with ICANN relating to the IANA functions to expire. As a result, for the first time since ICANN was founded in 1998, the multi-stakeholder community now oversees and administers the so-called Zone Files of the Top-Level Domains – such as .de or .com – autonomously and independently.
“I am delighted that the IANA Stewardship Transition was actually executed on the night to Saturday. If the US government had not honored their promise to relinquish control over the supervision of the IANA functions, it would have had devastating consequences, and would have contributed to the fragmentation of the Internet,” says Lawyer Thomas Rickert, Director of Names & Numbers at eco – Association of the Internet Industry e. V., who took a leading role in the development of the community proposal.
Court in Texas Opens the Way
This is the result of a two-year long process of discussions and contentions as to whether ICANN would take over the functions when the US government steps back from their contractual oversight of ICANN.
It got really exciting again in the last few weeks, as the Republican Senator Ted Cruz from Texas took great pains to have the transition prevented at the last minute. He saw freedom of opinion and the independence of the Internet as at stake. Advice from specialists that the IANA functions have absolutely no influence on either of these aspects made no impact on him. Cruz had the intention of linking the IANA Transition with the approval of the US budget for the coming three months, and to stop it in this way. He was not successful.
So, last Thursday, the path to the IANA Transition seemed clear. Any yet, on that same day, at the very last minute, a case was brought against the NTIA and the execution of the transition in the US states Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma and Nevada. Only a few hours before the IANA contract expired, the court in Texas rejected the claim and opened the way conclusively for the transition. Since midnight on the 1 October Washington DC time, ICANN is the sole custodian of the IANA functions.
