Collegues, In my Statement of Interest for the (elected) North American Representative to the At-Large Advisory Committee I mentioned the NAME contract renewal. The period for public comments on the proposed changes to the .NAME registry contract has concluded. I made the comment I suggested earlier in my SOI -- briefly that the public interest (competition policy) is clear, that competent alternatives to the incumbent contract holder exist, and a change of contract operator while meeting stability and security goals is feasible. In this note I wish to suggest that while the size of the .NAME registry is modest, and a great deal of attention is focused on the nearly two thousand applications awaiting evaluation, that the .NAME contract expiry does present an issue of the first importance. The DoC/NTIA RFI for the IANA Function and the follow-on RFP instructions for bidders addressed metrics for the contractor performance of the IANA Function. I pointed out in a note to this list on 8/14 that the addition of performance metrics makes repetition of the abuse of administrative delays to requested changes in the IANA root zone file for the purpose of compelling obligations from foreign governments to the current contractor unlikely. [Thanks to John Levine for asking "what the point of the exercise was", and to Brett Fausett for his comment.] The DoC/NTIA RFI proposed a separation of the operational and policy making roles. The follow-on RFP instruction for bidders required the separation of the operational (IANA) role from the policy making (ICANN) role of the contractor. The import of this is that the separation of policy development from root zone change management is no longer limited to entries corresponding to ISO 3166 code point assignments. IANA root zone change management is an operational role, distinct from the policy role of access control and generic policy development and compliance. It is an IANA Function to make changes to existing records in the IANA root zone. The operational nature of this role is now unrestricted as to origin of any particular delegation and code point or string assignment. The proposed changes to the .NAME contract, the proper subject of the policy making and compliance role (ICANN), is independent of the selection of the contractor to execute the terms of the original, or modified contract, which is the proper subject of the (IANA Function) operational role. The selection of the contractor manifests in a change to existing records in the IANA root zone. The present expiry of the .NAME contract is the first gTLD contract to be subject to re-policing by the policy making and compliance role (ICANN), and subject to contractor selection, manifested by a change to existing records in the IANA root zone, under the specific terms of the new IANA Function contract, recently awarded for a three year period to the Corporation. Public comment may, or may not, inform the Corporation's Board on any of the specific changes proposed to the existing .NAME contract, and the terms and conditions of the final contract are properly policy and compliance considerations. However, the selection of the party with which to contract is not Verisign by default, as other operational equivalent vendors exist, and the means of selection of a contractor among several operationally equivalent vendors by an agency of government or an entity exercising delegated authority by government is via the competitive award process, as the government did when soliciting vendors to provide the IANA Function earlier this year. In sum, the separation of policy from operations allows for the terms of the .NAME contract to be modified by the Corporation, if it follows a transparent and accountable process. However, it does not allow the Corporation to arbitrarily select the party to perform the .NAME contract, nor to arbitrarily select the parties to perform registry fail-over in the near future, as some, perhaps most, of the 2012 new gTLD round speculations fail to meet their investor goals and are abandoned. The public interest is thus more fundamental than the policy goal of advancing competition, originating in the Green and White Papers of the late 1990s. It is the independence of the public entity from the private interests it regulates or coordinates, originating in the various historic corruption reforms and modernly standardized in the Administrative Procedures Act of 1946. Eric Brunner-Williams Former Candidate, NARALO ALAC Rep. election 2012