While I completely agree with the general message of this memo, that
IANA works fine so don't break it, I have a few questions and a concern:
At the top of page 8, it refers to disputes about policy. To me the
question is ambiguous: does it mean disputes within the IETF, or
disputes between the IETF and IANA, e.g., "we can't implement that"?
As far as I know, there's never been a significant policy dispute with
IANA, so you might as well say so for anyone who was wondering about
that question.
At the top page 11, it claims that the MOU is "global in nature."
While that is surely the intention, the MOU is in practice a contract
between ICANN, a California corporation, and the IETF which to the
extent it exists, is a Virginia trust. So if push came to shove and
one side or the other had to enforce some provision of the contract
against the other, US law would apply and it'd happen in US courts.
So say that -- the IETF operates globally, but it is domiciled in the
US, and the current MOU with ICANN is a US agreement.
Following that, there is a discussion of all the stuff we don't want
to change, all of which is fine. But it doesn't say other than sort
of implicitly in #3 on page 13 that the IETF needs a binding agreement
with the IANA operator that has protections for the IETF community
that are substantially the same as those in the MOU in RFC 2860. It
really needs to say that explicitly.
If IANA stays with ICANN and ICANN reaffirms the MOU, we're fine. But
if it were someone else (wave hands about free-floating non-US things
that keep coming up in ALAC and NCUC discussions) who was less
interested in spending $1m/yr to provide a free service to what they
saw as a bunch of nerds from rich countries who keep getting in the
way of their core mission*, things could get very unpleasant.
R's,
John
* - providing an ever increasing revenue stream to contracted
registries and registrars