From: cwg-stewardship-bounces@icann.org [mailto:cwg-stewardship-bounces@icann.org] On Behalf Of Alan Greenberg

Currently NTIA passes judgement on pretty much EVERYTHING that IANA does, including details of what is on a report. The new authorization function (committee + Board) was to replace that, but only for the more substantive issues.

MM:  Again we seem to have fundamental differences in our conception of this committee. I never  viewed it as a replacement for _all_ of NTIA’s authority over IANA, and I don’t think many of us did see it that way. The real “replacement” for NTIA’s stewardship is threefold: in numbers, ir is the NRO, which contracts for the numbers functions; in protocols, it is the IETF, which contracts for protocols functions; and in names, it is basically the empowered community, which can take the names IANA functions away from ICANN if it jumps through six flaming hoops and wins a game of Twister.

MM: We created the committee because someone said, “suppose there is a need to make a major change in RZ operations comparable to DNSSEC. Where does the authority to do that lie?” We discovered that, absent NTIA, there was no clear institutional locus for initiating or approving those kinds of changes. So we created this committee for that very limited purpose. It was never conceived as a replacement for ALL of NTIA’s roles.