[Infowarrior] - Internet power grab: The duplicity of ICANN

[Richard Forno]

How ICANN pressures 'net engineers to give it behind-the-scenes control of the web

We must have IANA! We must have IANA!

1 May 2015 at 17:01, Kieren McCarthy

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/01/icann_iana_latest/

Behind-the-scenes efforts by ICANN's lawyers to force the internet community to grant it perpetual control of critical internet functions have been exposed.

Citing a cultural default of openness and transparency, negotiation teams from both the regional internet registries (RIRs) and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) have made details of their discussions over the IANA contract public. The IETF is probably best known to Reg readers as the people maintaining and developing the library of crucial RFC standards that are the blueprints of the internet and computer networking.

In revealing the conversations, the negotiation teams have put a spotlight on apparent duplicity between ICANN's public statements and its private behavior, and show just how far the organization is willing to go to secure control of the contract currently held by the US government – but which it intends to take over by the end of the year.

Earlier this month at a meeting in San Francisco, representatives from the negotiation team dealing with the "numbers" part of the IANA contract – the job of allocating IP addresses – stunned audience members when they revealed ICANN was refusing to accept the consensus document that the internet community had developed over the course of a year unless it specifically stated that ICANN would run the IANA functions forever.

IANA: What's at stake?

The US government contracts non-profit ICANN to run the so-called IANA functions – a body that runs the highest level of the world's DNS, allocates IP addresses, and ensures developers can agree on the same numbers and protocols when writing software that communicates over the 'net. It's what keeps the internet as we know it glued together.

That crucial contract is coming to an end, and because the US wants to step away from ruling the internet like an unelected king, the future of the IANA functions is being explored by a panel of experts called the Community Working Group (CWG). ICANN, of course, would love to run IANA all by itself, simply put.

A series of slides [PDF, pgs 17-27] outlined the negotiation, including one that read: "ICANN has verbally represented that they will reject any proposed agreement in which ICANN is not deemed the sole source prime contractor for IANA functions in perpetuity."

Incredibly, ICANN appears adamant that the US Department of Commerce and Congress will give California-based ICANN that role forever – despite both institutions having made statements that would strongly suggest otherwise.

The same slide reads: "ICANN asserts that neither NTIA [the Department of Commerce's National Telecommunications and Information Administration] nor US Congress will approve any transition plan which leaves open the possibility of a future non-US IANA Functions Operator."

This stance directly contradicts a statement given by ICANN's chairman Steve Crocker just a few weeks earlier in which he said in public that there was "nothing fundamental in them [the numbers and protocols proposals] that we have a problem with, full stop.”

The presentation then explicitly recognizes the benefit to the RIRs of having adopted a principle of transparency over how the IANA functions are negotiated. A slide reads: "Our transparency principle continues to benefit our community, in that we all now understand ICANN’s starting position in the negotiation. Without a transparency principle, only a handful of people would be aware of the state of the conversation, and they might not be aware of the precedents in this area. As in open-source software development, more eyes on a problem yield a better solution."

Next up: protocols

A very similar story has emerged from the IETF and its separate negotiation over the protocols aspects of the IANA contract.

On Thursday, the chairmen of the IETF, the IETF Administrative Oversight Committee (IAOC) and Internet Architecture Board (IAB) – Jari Arkko, Tobias Gondrom and Andrew Sullivan, respectively – published a carefully worded update that revealed that ICANN was also refusing to accept wording changes to the annual "Supplemental Agreement" between the two organizations.

The same issues seem to be at the heart of it: recognition that ICANN may not in future be the IANA functions operator.

"After some iterations, we arrived at text that we think captures the IETF consensus," the chairmen noted, "but ICANN has informed us that they are unable to agree to that text right now."

The chairmen have said they will not release the actual text that ICANN is refusing without agreement from all parties, but they did give a clear explanation over the issues it covers:

In that document the community sought to have some facts acknowledged as part of any IANA transition plan:

	• The protocol parameters registries are in the public domain. It is the preference of the IETF community that all relevant parties acknowledge that fact as part of the transition.
	• It is possible in the future that the operation of the protocol parameters registries may be transitioned from ICANN to subsequent operator(s).
The update reveals that ICANN again argues that the US government would not accept such an agreement. It reads: "ICANN told us that, in their opinion, agreeing to that text now would possibly put them in breach of their existing agreement with the NTIA.”

What's going on behind the curtain?

These latest revelations are just the latest in a string of efforts by ICANN to ensure the organization gains full control  of the IANA contract, with minimal impact on its current procedures.

Initially, ICANN tried to control the process by announcing two separate processes – one looking into the IANA transition, and a second at its own accountability improvements – while insisting the two were not related.

That effort was beaten down after an unprecedented letter by the leaders of every one of ICANN's supporting organizations and advisory committees that said the two processes must be connected.

Next, ICANN was accused of stacking the deck by purposefully excluding groups skeptical of ICANN’s efforts, and by trying to give ICANN's chairman the right to personally select the members of the group that would decide the final proposal. That was also beaten back.

ICANN's staff then produced a "scoping document" that would limit discussion both on topics and in the way in which they could be discussed. Another furore forced another backtrack.

Then, at the NetMundial conference in Sao Paulo, ICANN used its co-organizer status to force a last-minute change to the final document that would have seen it recommend a clear split between the operational and policy aspects of the IANA function - effectively keeping IANA as a separate entity within ICANN.

A few months later, ICANN's lawyers produced a document in which they claimed many of the initial plans for the IANA contract and changes to ICANN itself were illegal under California law.

When the internet community decided as a result that it was important to have independent legal advice on its plans, ICANN's legal team inserted itself onto the relevant sub-team. That sub-team was then closed off to internet community members, and ICANN's lawyers helped decide both the scope and approach as well as the legal team that was chosen to provide advice.

Its first significant piece of advice to the broader group was to drop a plan to have the IANA contract held by an external party and only consider either giving IANA to ICANN or setting it up as an ICANN subsidiary. ICANN's senior counsel remains the group's secretariat.

Despite all these efforts, however, the fundamental recommendations from all three parts of the IANA contract remain the same:

	• It must be possible to separate the IANA contract from ICANN at some possible future date
	• There must be stronger accountability measures on ICANN if the US government role is to disappear
Having failed to stop these recommendations through process, then in public, ICANN is now attempting to undermine the internet community's wishes in private.

Its strategy appears to be to get the numbers and protocols groups to agree to put ICANN in permanent charge of their IANA functions. In that effort, it claims to speak for the US government, which is hamstrung thanks a Congressional budget rider.

The second part of the strategy is then to insist that all the IANA functions – including the most complex names aspect – must be held together in a single function.

If it achieves both those goals, ICANN may effectively bypass mechanisms that the names group is developing that would allow a review group to decide to split the IANA functions away from ICANN at some future point if it fails to live up to expectations and agreements.

Reinforcing perceptions

Unfortunately for ICANN, each step it takes to undermine the process and put itself in charge simply reinforces the belief that it cannot be trusted to run such a critical function without strict safeguards. And the best safeguard is to make it possible to remove IANA from the organization altogether.

What is baffling from the internet engineers' point of view is why ICANN does not put the same amount of energy and effort into funding and improving the IANA functions as it does into trying to lock them down.

Each of the three IANA groups – names, numbers and protocols – have repeatedly noted that they are happy with how ICANN carries out those functions.

If ICANN really wants to retain IANA, all it has to do is keep its customers happy. Refusing to accept those groups' carefully developed proposals and trying to strong-arm them in private while claiming to agree in public is not going to help in that. ®

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It's better to burn out than fade away.