[CPWG] Re: IETF IPMC - CPWG, 9 July 2025

Dear Christopher, thanks for your kind email. Please find my comments inline: On 06/07/2025 12:54, lists@christopherwilkinson.eu wrote:

Good afternoon:

Subject: IETF IPMC - CPWG, 9 July 2025

Since I shall be traveling next Wednesday, I don’t know whether I shall be able to join the call.

So the staff may provisionally register my apologies.

Meanwhile I trust that Olivier and Greg, both of whom have been following this question with me closely, will be able to be there, and that significant time will have been allocated.

I summaries my points under three headings:

- The creation of the IPMC (Intellectual Property Management Corporation), and its forthcoming Bylaws;

- the scope of the IPMC and eventual broadening to include other classes of intellectual property, notably the copyrights of ‘Requests for Comments’ (RFCs) which are the technical standards on the basis of which large swathes of the Internet function today, world-wide;

- the Community Coordination Group (CCG) and particularly the so-called ‘Names Community’. Which ‘coordination’, seems by and large, never to have taken place.

*Reference documents: *

I attach a .pdf copy of the 2016 ‘Community Agreement’, below.

For the Bylaws, I expect that Greg will post the current version, as amended.^1 <about:blank?compose#sdfootnote1sym>

*1. IPMC and its Bylaws *

I welcome the fact that Greg has conducted a far reaching legal and editorial revision of the draft Bylaws. We don’t yet know whether these revised Bylaws will be adopted by the IETF Trust. Indeed some opposition has been expressed. From my point of view an important distinction has been introduced to clarify that in (US Delaware) law, the IETF Trust and the IETF IPMG would now be different entities.

I believe that no action can be taken by IPMC until its Bylaws have been adopted and published.

I also note that the putative transfer of the IANA IPR (trademarks and domain names) to the IPMC cannot take place until the CCG approves. Which is not yet the case. Indeed, since the announced purpose of the IPMC is to harbour IETF IPR, initially and notably the IANA IPR, I am surprised that the initial creation of IPMC was not also subject to advice from the CCG.

I agree with the points you are making in respect of the Bylaw changes. In my opinion, the transfer of IANA Intellectual Property cannot take place until everyone is satisfied with the IPMC Bylaws being fixed and addressing the other issues I have raised, starting from the 30 September 2016 IANA IPR Agreements. The transfer of IANA IPR is, it seems, the only way the Names Community have any leverage in regards to the IETF IPMC and I have grave concerns that if a transfer takes place before the Bylaws are fixed, they will never get fixed. When I was at the IGF, I met with Hans Petter Holen (Co-Chair of CCG for Numbers Community) and I gather he understood that this would be a wise way to go.

*2. IPMC Scope and the RFCs*

Article IV – ‘Assets’ of the proposed Bylaws envisages that the IPMC would also acquire licensing rights for RFCs, some of which are already held by the IETF Trust. Should this eventually become a dominant feature of the IPMC, it could completely transform the political, industrial and economic context of Internet Governance, world-wide.

I believe that there are about 5,800 RFCs. At a guess, there might be hundreds of thousands of implementations of RFCs, mostly by corporations, administrations, individuals and their users, nearly all of whom have no voice in IETF, nor in ICANN.

Personally, I find that such a potentially far reaching change should not be undertaken until there has been extensive information and consultation of interested parties. To date that has not taken place at all.

I would not expect that to be undertaken by IETF alone because there is such extensive overlap between the members of the IETF Trust and the IPMC, notably in the representation of the ‘Protocol Community’.

It is my understanding that the IETF Trust already holds the rights for the RFCs. Whilst I agree with your concerns, we might have a problem as to whether what happens with the IETF intellectual property falls in the remit of the CCG, which was formed solely in relation to the transfer of IANA IPRs. I also agree with you that it is troubling that there is so much overlap between the Protocol Community, the IETF Trust and the IETF IPMC. Is the IETF Trust (and now the IETF IPMC) the same trustable organisation as the one that was originally defined to hold the RFCs and later, the IANA IPR? That is one of the questions we should be asking ourselves.

*3. The Names Community within the CCG.*

Bylaws Clause 1.18 (Definitions – Names Community) relates to a long-defunct grouping derived from the 2016 Transition negotiations (CWG). The there stated members of the ‘Names Community’ are GNSO, ccNSO, ALAC, SSAC and GAC. Later in these texts, this vast group is afforded only three members of CCG with voting power and only one ‘majority vote’ at the CCG itself.

Recently, in response to a query about this arrangement, an IETF member gracefully dismissed the question with :

“……/That definition was agreed by all of the signers of the Community Agreement.  The fact that the Names Community needs to do more internal coordination than the others is fine/.”

Well, it’s not ‘fine’ at all.

As far as I know, since September 2016 there has been hardly any use of the CCG mailing list, no exchange of information, no attempt to coordinate anything and had it not been for an unexpected e-mail one year ago about IPMC, most of us would still be in blythe ignorance that anything was happening at all.

I can’t speak for ICANN, who apparently signed the agreement in September 2016, but I rather doubt that they would be eager to coordinate such an assemblage of SOs and ACs on matters of Internet technical standards and related IPRs.

Obviously in today’s context, such a portmanteau assemblage would be quite unwieldy in practice. Also the significance of Internet technical specifications has vastly increased meanwhile.

***

Accordingly, I would submit that CPWG and ALAC should have a preliminary discussion about a more workable solution. I forebear to make any suggestions about the other ‘Communities’, bearing in mind that even GAC apparently never designated their own representative.

From my notes, I can quote some of the history: --- start note --- In a message on 1^st March 2017, Tobias Gondrom, Chair of the IETF Trust, announced the transfer of Intellectual Property Registration (“IPR”) for the IANA. /“The agreement with CSC requires the incorporation of the License Agreements' Exhibit E Domain Name Registrar Requirements.Exhibit E is the same in each of the three license agreements between the Trust and ICANN.”/ /“Following acceptance of these proposed changes it is believed the next steps to be:/ /a.Community Review b.Trust and ICANN execute amendments to the three License Agreements c.Incorporate the changes in CSC Agreement Schedule A/ /(Schedule A is the same as Exhibit E of the License Agreements)/ /d.Trust puts Schedule A of the CSC Agreement out for Community Review e.Community Review f.Trust executes CSC Agreement g.CSC Test of conformance to the requirements h.All IANA domains transferred upon successful test/ /Your feedback by 20 March 2017 on the proposed amendments to the License Agreements and the next steps are appreciated./” Responses were received from: Russ Housley – No Objection Greg Shatan – need to check more Ray Pelletier – asking any additional comments? Christopher Wilkinson – will review and suggests meeting at ICANN58 in Copenhagen (but no meeting ever took place) Alan Barrett – queries a change of term in the paragraphs John Curran – Chair NRO – legal has raised a couple of points Kaveh Ranjbar – new IETF Trust Chair – responds on 30 March 2017 the next steps according to the Trustees meeting: /“Next Steps/ /a.Trust sends response to CCG questions b.CCG reviews and comments c.Upon acceptance, Trust publishes Exhibit E for community review / /[Exhibit E to License Agreement: Domain Name Registrar Requirements]/ /d.Community Review e.With no substantive changes, Trust and ICANN execute amendments to the three License Agreements f.Changes incorporated in the CSC Agreement Schedule A/ /[Schedule A is the same as Exhibit E of the License Agreements] g.Trust publishes Schedule A of the CSC Agreement for Community Review h.Community Review i.With no substantive changes, Trust executes CSC Agreement j.Test of CSC conformance to the requirements k.Assuming successful test, all IANA domains transferred to Trust”/ The IETF Trust (Chair Kaveh Ranjbar) then published the final process forward on 2^nd May 2017 – asking for Community Consultation. https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ccg/fAfcg-s21YqNfTrYuhipz9LDZ60/ --- end of notes --- At the time, in the CCG mailing list thread, you questioned whether agreement was received from all parties and the response given to you was that indeed, this was all part of the IETF Trust's consultation. Upon hindsight, reading the follow-up email thread, there appears to have been no further follow-up. In addition to this, there was an undocumented change of legal Party since 2016: the Internet Society acted for the Internet Engineering Task Force in 2016 since the Internet Engineering Task Force was merely an activity of the Internet Society. This no longer applies and nothing has been done to remove the Internet Society from the Parties. We have a Legal Party without an Activity. The changing nature of the Internet Engineering Task Force has never been notified to all other Parties. The IANA Agreement has never been changed since that change took place. There are a lot of changing factors to be taken into account. And of top of that, there is a missing executed copy of the Second Amended and Restated Trust Agreement ("The Second Agreement") as amended on 6 November 2018 --- referring an IETF Trust Board meeting whose minutes are also missing. At best, that makes for a lot of untidy archives and processes. I therefore reiterate that given Greg's Track Changes draft, it would be prudent to suggest to Sam Eisner that, mindful that our work appears to have uncovered material failures in compliance with the requirements of the IANA IPR Assignment Agreement, the IANA IPR Community Agreement plus the three IANA IPR License Agreements ("the 30 September 2016 IANA Agreements"), it is also imperative to launch an "IANA IPR Agreement Legal Compliance Review" which would pick up all of these problems and endeavour to fix them. Kindest regards, Olivier