ICANN Suggests Moving Internet From US Control

Comments on the future of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) – which makes the underlying changes to the internet – are slowly trickling in at the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), with five days to go to the end of a consultation period. In its comments, the body managing the IANA functions for the United States suggests moving control of those functions out of longstanding, singular US control.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), which has been performing the IANA functions since 1998, Friday night filed its statement promoting to move IANA slightly away from the US administration. The IANA functions include management of the central root zone of the internet domain name system, management of the pool of globally available internet protocol addresses, and the management of the database containing protocol numbers essential for the communication on the internet.

To “fully transfer the management of these functions” was the declared goal of the official “white paper” creating ICANN, ICANN reminded the US administration in its statement. As the US government is “not party to” several activities – namely the IP address allocation and the protocol number assignment – “there is no compelling reason for these functions to be performed exclusively pursuant to a U.S. Government procurement contract,” it said.

ICANN, in its statement, proposed to perform these functions under contracts with the Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)/Internet Architecture Board (IAB), respectively.

With regard to the sensitive issue of the root zone management, ICANN appears to accept further US oversight, but requests that the whole procedure of making changes to the root zone – such as adding new top level domains like .xxx or registering changes to who manages a TLD – be completely transparent. This means not only on ICANN’s site, but also on the site of the administration.

The United States’ unilateral oversight over the root zone has been a contentious issue in international negotiations for years. In its current consultation, the United States is reacting to concerns by other nation states by asking for proposals on how changes to national TLDs, like .uk, .cn or .ir could be performed in the future.

Statements filed with NTIA available here.

NTIA’s original call for comments here [pdf].