ICANN is neither Star Trek’s Starship Enterprise nor Nanny ICANN. In response to Stephanie’s questions here are short comments. For RDS ICANN is not going where nobody has gone before and it is not some sort of global Internet Nanny. ICANN should restrict itself to the minimum dataset it needs to conduct its business with Registries and Registrars within it DNS Remit. Full Stop!

Let Registries and Registrars deal with the “how to authenticate law enforcement requests” at the national and multilateral level. ICANN can, in the public interest, advise one and all on best policy there but it cannot weld an authentication process into its contracts. Within its remit ICANN has no right to do so. One might suspect that the Registries and Registrars are trying to off load onto ICANN work they should be sorting out among themselves, both nationally and multilaterally. That is how the rest of the world does it. There seems to be a tendency toward ICANN exceptionalism here. What ICANN does is important but it is not exceptional, it is business in the public interest. How it does it is exceptional: consensus policy (within the REMIT) based on a multistakeholder process.

Lastly, and this is important, this process is not about fixing something that is broken. Much of what works badly is actually at the national and multilateral level and outside ICANN’s remit in any event. At best the goal here is to improve a process, but there is no urgency. The work can be tiring but in the absence of urgency the rational decision is to slow the process down, to make it less burdensome and not result in hasty rash bad decisions.