Hi Seun,

On 18 December 2014 at 12:14, Seun Ojedeji <seun.ojedeji@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Jordan,

Let me make another attempt to clarify my point

On Thu, Dec 18, 2014 at 11:18 AM, Jordan Carter <jordan@internetnz.net.nz> wrote:
Hi Seun,

On 17 December 2014 at 18:21, Seun Ojedeji <seun.ojedeji@gmail.com> wrote:

I am afraid you're not getting the point. That contractual and organisational separation is very important. It is the *fact* of that separation between entities and managing relationships by contract that allows us all to feel comfortable.

I think you are mis-understanding my point which is that gTLD at the moment ONLY has its home in ICANN. Yes contractual approach is currently been used for gTLD because there is no sense of strong accountability within the organisation. If there is then need to continue the contractual route it can ONLY work in the manner currently being used i.e an entirely independent organisation (like the RIR, IETF, ccTLD, NTIA) makes a service agreement with the operator. However as we have now identified the need to transition oversight to multistakeholder, that can ONLY be effective by implementing mechanism within an organisation that allows the multistakholder community feel somewhat in charge.

We are talking about entirely different things.

There is no linkage at all between the ICANN-gTLD contracts and the two contracts I am talking about.

The ICANN-gTLD contracts are because the gTLDs are an ICANN creation. Neither their existence, nor the absence of contracts between ccTLDs and ICANN, has anything to do with the questions we are dealing with here.

All we are dealing with is whether ICANN should own the stewardship of the IANA functions, or whether an organisation outside ICANN has that stewardship. In my opinion it should be outside ICANN, because an inside ICANN solution makes it next to impossible to ensure that a necessary change of IANA operator will be achievable.

You *cannot* have ICANN as steward and an equivalence of accountability to today, no matter what you do in the -accountability CCWG or in terms of improving ICANN accountability.

I think we now can see where we are talking about different things...

So I ask a question - if you want to put stewardship inside ICANN, can you explain why?

<snip>

Even if ICANN transitions to a more accountable organisation in terms of what it does, that doesn't balance out the very far-reaching change you seem to have suggested of putting all the pieces in one basket.

The way i understand it, there has always been a basket, just that the basket gets sighted by another party i.e NTIA (without NTIA changing its content) before it arrives Verisign who then load the content of the basket in the store.

What if one person controls the whole process, as you are proposing? That's the nub of my concern.

The whole process has always been from one source (i.e the IANA operator) so what its important is ensuring that instruction sent from the source is as expected. This does not require any external body to look at but require internal mechanism that ensure the operator does not send information that is not inline with the community's policy (which will largely require the bylaw/policy rewording)

No. The one source of authority has been NTIA, which has contracts with ICANN to be the IANA Functions Operator, and with Verisign to be the Root Zone Maintainer.

You are proposing that the one source of authority be ICANN.

I am saying I disagree, and I am further saying that nowhere have I yet seen an argument that sets out why consolidating things in one place is a good idea.

best,

Jordan