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

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.

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’.

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.

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Xàbia, 4 July 2015

Attachment: Community Agreement (2016)