Hi, I apologise that I didn't come across as clearly as I should have. Let me try again. On Wed, Apr 08, 2015 at 09:38:07PM +0000, Milton L Mueller wrote:
-----Original Message----- The IETF, however, is in a different boat, as it doesn't think it needs such an agreement, so that is a cost of some forms of the legal separation that are
Really? It already has such an agreement, so it must think it needs one.
My point is that the IETF already has an agreement with which it is satisfied. It has identified a couple small changes -- as far as it can tell entirely consistent with the spirit of its MoU and the annual SLAs that have been negotiated -- that ought to be made as part of a new SLA in order to tighten things up on the assumption that ICANN's agreement with NTIA will go away. But in effect, the IETF's position has been that it needs no new agreement. That is not what the RIRs have said, so that was the difference I was trying to talk about.
The only change would be that its IANA has a slightly different corporate form.
"Maybe," is my point. Under some of the forms, IANA is still just a department of ICANN. ICANN could argue plausibly that it could maintain its agreements with other bodies and then use an administrative mechanism to separate the provision of those functions by having IANA do it. This is certainly the case when IANA remains a department of ICANN with a bunch of new ICANN-internal rules around how IANA is to be treated within ICANN the corporation. It is possibly the case under an arrangement in which PTI is an affiliate of ICANN, and ICANN is the sole member of PTI. It seems much less plausible under the case where PTI is some more-independent organization with a board composed of members other than just ICANN. So it could be that an agreement between IETF and PTI would need to be negotiated. For the purposes of transition, it is hard for ICANN to argue to the IETF that a significantly altered agreement between ICANN and IETF is necessary for the transition to happen: the IETF has available to it the argument from stability: "Here is the agreement we're operating under, and the transition is supposed not to affect any of the operations, so what is the reason to change the terms?" But a completely new organization has its own changed circumstances available as a premise in a counter-argument, which means that the terms between the IETF and an independent PTI could well need to be different. For instance, perhaps PTI's funding model would depend on a continued unity of IANA; and if that were to fail, PTI would become unsustainable. In such a case, PTI might not agree to the 6 month termination that the IETF currently has, or might not agree that the IAB has final say in dispute resolution, or whatever. I do not know whether any such case is plausible or a real risk. My point is that, the further we move from "non-names communities' arrangements remain with ICANN," the more we are changing as part of the transition. Each additional change incurs some amount of risk. That risk might be worth trading against other gains we might think we're making, but the engineer in me says that when you are changing things you want to change as little as you can get away with in order to encourage stability of the whole system. Perhaps you're right in saying that that, if the IETF walks away from the current arrangement, it's no big deal. I think a unified IANA is valuable, but I agree that it's not a must-have. On the other hand, losing one of the "three legs" of IANA as part of the transition also seems like a fairly large change, and so one that seems to me undesirable if we can avoid it.
But here's the bottom line: there is no way the IETF can reasonably demand that the entire names community abstain from choosing its optimal solution because such a solution would create what is, after all, a very minor inconvenience for IETF.
I don't think that was what I was saying. I was observing that adding a new entity does not appear to offer a way to ensure that the pre-existing arrangements will automatically carry through to new organizations. It's worth noting that the MoU text in RFC 2860 does not have a successors and assigns clause. So there is some risk in trying to move the agreement to a new organization, particularly if that move entails changes to the agreement or if one of the parties thinks that it's an opportunity to try to renegotiate. Given that several people seem to have taken the transition itself as an opportunity to forge new arrangements for ICANN, it doesn't seem impossible that someone might attempt similar renegotiation of agreements. Best regards, A (speaking as ever for myself) -- Andrew Sullivan ajs@anvilwalrusden.com