Hi John,
On 03/12/2014 07:11, John Levine wrote:
...
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.
At the the time the MoU was signed, that Trust did not exist. The
IETF was simply in some sort of loose association with ISOC, which
iirc is a D.C. corporation. Not that this changes your argument.
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.
I agree that a US court would very likely accept jurisdiction, but
I don't think we need to say that. We should say that we are global.
That's sufficient for this draft's purpose.
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.
I think the first sentence on page 15 covers this:
"What is necessary as part of transition is the completion of any
supplemental agreement(s) necessary to achieve the requirements
outlined in our response in Section III of this RFP."
If IANA stays with ICANN and ICANN reaffirms the MOU, we're fine.
As a point of order, they don't need to reaffirm it. All they need
to do is not give notice to cancel it.
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.
Sure. But this document is surely not the place for a contingency plan.
Brian
R's,
John
* - providing an ever increasing revenue stream to contracted
registries and registrars