Interesting. So given statements like: "Why do you think governments have free reign over their ccTLDs?" "we only approve delegation and redelegation requests to meet a number of criteria." and the with policy process your describe, national sovereignty is not the ultimate authority of a ccTLD. Rather ICANN is. It sounds like an organizational map might put ccTLDs under ICANN on the same level as registries. Is there documentation that demonstrates interests of the local Internet community in the case of .MD/Moldova? Thanks

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: [NA-Discuss] LACTLD Statement From: Kim Davies <kim.davies@icann.org> Date: Mon, October 05, 2009 5:20 pm To: Garth Bruen at KnujOn <gbruen@knujon.com> Cc: NA Discuss <na-discuss@atlarge-lists.icann.org>

On 5/10/09 1:26 PM, "Garth Bruen at KnujOn" <gbruen@knujon.com> wrote:

...

This is at odds with everything we've been told. Doesn't sovereignty trump all? Are you telling me that ICANN or other parties can dictate to a country how their ccTLD may be used? Because this is not as I understood it.

ICANN doesn't dictate to "a country" how their ccTLD may be used. We are saying we only approve delegation and redelegation requests to meet a number of criteria. We do not tell a country "you must have XYZ run your TLD", however we may tell XYZ if they apply for a delegation that "your request for delegation is deficient in the following ways..."

The essence of our evaluation is what is in the interests of the local Internet community. I think Antony covered it well in his posts, but sometimes a government's desire for a transfer does not appropriately reflect the wishes of the community, and is not a stable path forward. In my time at ICANN certainly there have been requests of this nature have not been endorsed by ICANN.

I think its worth highlighting we are talking about corner cases here. The majority of ccTLD operators are widely supported and there is no argument between the community and the government.

...

And where is the multi-stakeholder participation when one person signs a document transferring ccTLD management to a private foreign company?

When a ccTLD is delegated, the entity it is delegated to is the "sponsor" or "trustee". They do not have the right to wholly on-transfer their responsibility, but they can outsource or otherwise grant operational rights to other entities. We still consider this trustee the responsible party even if they have engaged other parties to do technical operations or other aspects of the domain's operation.

The situation I am most familiar with is .au, where in the past I was a director of "auDA" that is basically like a local version of ICANN for operating the .au domain. It has a community elected board and sets naming policy for .au. auDA itself doesn't run the registry operations, each four years it holds a tender and currently the registry operator is a company called Ausregistry. This doesn't mean that auDA has transferred .au to Ausregistry. Further, if auDA decided to use Afilias or VeriSign as its registry operator, I don't think it would be fair to characterise that as them transferring ccTLD management to a private company.

kim